


Restitution

by BobLoblawLawBlog



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-24
Updated: 2014-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-14 12:35:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 23,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2192070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BobLoblawLawBlog/pseuds/BobLoblawLawBlog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series on Korra's recovery process, told from the perspectives of many different characters. Some are based on prompts, and some are my own invention.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tonraq

Tonraq is thankful for the pain. Each time he drifts off to sleep, his head falls awkwardly to one side and sends a jolt of fire through his injured shoulder, and he shudders, barely awake before the cool night air reminds him where he is. There are wisps of cloud between patches of black – stars everywhere. Way in front of him, he sees the back of the Sato girl’s head, her long curls raked by the breeze, her hands firmly on Oogi’s reins. 

Panic seizes him for a second, a wave of sickness deep inside his gut, and he looks down to see that her hand is still knotted in his, their fingers threaded together. Her eyes are closed, but there is pressure, and her hand is warm – too warm. 

“You should sleep. I can watch her.”

He looks up to see the firebender sitting at a calculated distance. His legs are drawn up gawkily to make room for all the injured bodies on the saddle. Tonraq registers the discomfort and sympathizes – he knows what it’s like to be a tall boy in a world that doesn’t quite fit around him. 

“I’m fine,” says Tonraq, trying to draw himself up a little straighter, gritting his teeth against the soreness it awakens. Instinctively, he draws Korra’s hand closer to himself and realizes only when he sees the look on the young man’s face that he likely looks like a moose lion guarding its calf. Mako is no threat. Tonraq has never actually seen him that way.

“You look uncomfortable,” Tonraq offers. “You could’ve ridden back with the others,” referring to the group that went back to collect the Zaofu team instead of heading straight to Republic City. The earthbending brother is with them – he wanted to be close to the Beifong girl. 

Mako’s lips form a line, and he just shakes his head. And Tonraq realizes he is still not helping. He lets go of Korra’s hand and tries to rearrange her, to make just a little bit more room. He touches her, and his hands feel too large, too rough, though they used to pick her up when she was so tiny and throw her into the air just to hear her laugh. Higher, higher, she would scream. He tries to lift her, imagining that once again she weighs as much as a seal lion pup, and then his arm flares in pain again, and he bites back a gasp. 

Mako unfolds himself and leans forward before hesitating. Tonraq looks in the boy’s face and recognizes.

“Could you?” he asks. And Mako immediately reaches out to help him resettle her before stretching out just a little bit more. 

“Dad?”

Her voice is like broken glass that cuts him, but the pain feels good. He looks down and sees her eyes slitted open. 

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“I wasn’t asleep,” she says, but it’s not clear that she can really tell the difference. 

“You could’ve fooled me,” he says and tries to crack a smile at her. The swelling on her face is slightly worse, and there is something off about the way she looks at him. 

“If I was sleeping, why am I still so tired?”

He laughs a little, “You’ve been through a lot.”

It’s then that he notices the chapping on her lips and curses himself. He should be getting her to drink more, but he didn’t want to wake her up. 

Tonraq gestures at Mako, whose brow is folding in on itself, and the young man freezes for a second before he feels for the water skin lying amid the other baggage. Tonraq opens it and bends a mouthful of water toward her lips. She accepts it a gulp at a time. He wishes, not for the first time, that he’d learned to heal. 

“Zaheer,” she says, her voice full of distress.

“He’s gone,” he replies quickly. “You beat him, Korra. You saved everyone. I can’t tell you how proud I am…”

“He was here just a second ago.”

Tonraq stops and registers the fear in her face. She blinks a few times through the exhaustion and then screws her eyes shut. A moan escapes her mouth, and he can’t tell if it’s the pain or something else. Nonsense syllables spill from between her lips, and he thinks he hears the word “Vaatu.”

“It’s ok, sweetheart. You’re fine now.”

Her voice turns into a cry, and Tonraq decides that the pain medication has worn off. He checks the position of the moon and guesses it’s at least an hour before she’s due for another dose, but still. 

“Mako, get the kit.”

Korra struggles a bit when he tries to get her to take the clear liquid. “This will help,” he offers. But she keeps her eyes squeezed shut and shakes her head. 

Tonraq remembers a song, a song he used to sing to her when she was little, back when it was still his job to rock her to sleep. He doesn’t even know if she’ll remember it. He runs a hand through her hair, fingernails lightly massaging her scalp. Her hair is beautiful like her mother’s, though she’s always worn it like a warrior. The song comes out of him, but he can’t remember all the words. 

Gradually, her face relaxes. “I’m cold,” she says. But her skin is hot. 

It a flurry of motion, Mako adjusts the blanket around her. Then Tonraq sees him think for a second before removing his own coat and throwing it over her body. She turns her head and blinks in the firebender’s direction a few times. 

“It’s you,” she says. 

Mako fusses with the worn, grey jacket a bit more, trying to cover as much of her as possible. 

“Yeah,” he says, before retreating back into his own space. He meets Tonraq’s gaze for a second with pain behind his eyes, and Tonraq once again suppresses any curiosity about what happened between them. 

“Take the medicine, Korra,” the boy finally says. “You’ll feel better.”

To Tonraq’s surprise, his daughter lifts her head just a bit as he bends two drops of the liquid to her mouth. It acts fast, and soon he can hear her breathing, strong and slow in sleep. He takes her hand again and examines the scar tissue on her knuckles and the bandages on her forearms. 

He remembers the first time he took her hunting and she fell on the ice. And he had carried her tiny body at a half sprint all the way back to Katara’s hut. Korra is going to be fine. She always was. Tonraq would never get used to seeing his daughter fall, but he’d grown accustomed over time to seeing her get back up again. 

Silence wraps itself around them again, and once more, the urge to drift off becomes overwhelming. The last thing he sees is the firebender’s hand briefly fall over his daughter’s before fluttering away again.

…

In the morning, they arrive, and Tonraq is past the point of mere pain. The joint is stiff and completely inflexible where before he could at least move a little. The shock of Oogi’s landing elicits an involuntary groan, and Mako is up in an instant, helping him stand. The boy is thin but very strong, and for a moment Tonraq resents his youth. 

The island is eerily silent, empty. But out of the dawn mists a group of acolytes come running. “Get the healers,” he yells at them, “Go!” His voice is resonant but frayed at the edges, scratching like the needle on a phonograph. He looks down at the bodies of Tenzin, Kya, Bumi, and Korra and massages his bandaged arm.

“Mako, don’t wait for them,” he says. “Take her inside.”

He barely speaks the words, and the firebender is scooping her up, steady as he lifts her and anchors her weight against his body. Asami is tending to the other fallen, and Tonraq stands to watch the bundle that is his child disappear inside the house. And for a second, Mako’s back becomes that of a waterbending master with grey hair, and the girl in her arms is four years old. Tonraq has watched his daughter be carried off in the arms of others many, many times. 

…

Korra’s room at Air Temple Island feels stark, and Tonraq wishes he had Water Tribe furs to throw over her bed and keep her warm. The blankets that cover her are saffron, and the entire place smells like incense. He thinks for a second that Korra should be healing at home in the igloo he and Senna still share in the South. But was that ever really home for Korra? Did she ever spend more than a few days at a time there since they discovered she was the Avatar? It is hard, at times, for him to remember Korra’s childhood the way she must remember it. 

The healers’ prognosis is grim but not hopeless. She may be weak for a long time, they say. Her injuries from the fight will heal, but the long-term effects of the poison are unknown. There may be pain, considerable pain, for a while. A great deal will depend on her. My daughter is strong, he insists to himself. I don’t care what they say. 

When Korra wakes up, this becomes harder to sustain. The agony in her face is impossible to hide. And she keeps resisting anything that might allow her to sleep through it. “I’m fine,” she says, and then her eyes screw shut, and her fists clench, and she always winds up giving in. He offers his hand and lets her squeeze it until she falls asleep again. There is a war happening inside, and it’s one he can’t fight with of her. 

“Chief Tonraq, we finally have your wife on the phone.” An acolyte stands tensely at the bedside. Tonraq gently sets Korra’s hand back on the sheets and struggles a bit to rise. A slender arm darts out to steady him, and he looks up to see the Sato girl. He doesn’t know when she returned to the room. Her face as composed as always but looking somewhat worse for wear. 

“Come get me if she wakes up,” he says, and Asami’s head bobs in assent. He tries not to look too hard at his daughter as he thinks about what he must say. Senna has gotten this sort of call too many times. Korra’s bending is gone. Well, she can airbend. It’s difficult to explain. 

In the hallway, he sees Tenzin stagger out of one of the healing rooms, and Mako is just behind him, grabbing one of the airbending master’s arms and throwing it over his shoulder. “We’re gonna go see her,” the younger man says, and as they pass Tenzin grabs Tonraq by the arm. “Your daughter is very strong.”

Tonraq only nods. Tenzin does not look particularly strong. He remembers fighting alongside the airbender when Korra was first kidnapped. They were all much younger then, so much more resilient. It didn’t take so long to heal. And they’d been able to protect her. But now Tenzin is leaning hard against Mako after Korra had nearly laid down her life for him. When did the children start carrying them? 

There is static on the line when he lifts the receiver to his ear. His wife’s voice breaks through, and he can hear the tensing of her jaw as she steels herself for whatever is coming. He has a speech prepared. She deserves to know what he has seen, to know that all was very nearly lost. He is tempted to confess that he was afraid, that he is still afraid. But in the moment, he forgets all of it and says the only thing that seems to matter in the moment: “Senna, she’s alive. She was brilliant, and she is going to be just fine.”


	2. Tenzin

It’s three days before Tenzin feels like walking around again, but as soon as he does, he begins gathering flowers, the ones that grow from trees on one side of the island, where his father planted them over thirty years ago. They bloom twice a year, and he is thankful that the season is right as he examines the sky blue buds that grow in giant clumps, five petals on each, white centers peeking out at the sun.

He picks flowers until he fills his cloak, which he then carries back over the island toward the temple. His family is preparing breakfast out of doors, the air being so sweet and healing and the Temple being crowded with so many visitors. 

“There you are,” says Pema, walking over to him with Rohan on one hip. He bends to kiss her lips. “I was starting to get worried.”

“Just enjoying the morning,” he responds. But he can see that his wife’s face is still sadder than usual, that the stress of the last several days has worn on her. He vows to check in with her regularly as the normal rhythms of life resume.

“What’s in your cloak, Daddy?” There is a sharp tug on the gathered hem, and a few blooms come spilling out.

“Careful, Meelo,” he says. “These are for something … very special.”

Pema looks at the flowers, and her eyebrow quirks up. “I thought we were going to talk about this later,” she says. But she is smiling, knowing the delay has always been on his side rather than hers. 

“It’s time,” he says. He scans the group of saffron-clad figures and finds the one he is looking for. Kai is whispering something into her ear, and she has a hand clapped over her mouth in laughter. And though he has his reservations about the boy, Tenzin feels his heart grow warmer. He has marked the signs of maturity appearing daily in his daughter’s face, but he is comforted by the fact that for all that she has seen, she still smiles and laughs easily. 

Jinora’s face turns upward and find’s her father’s eyes. He watches her appraise him, the giant bundle in his arms, the spilled flowers on the ground. And her mouth falls open in recognition, and she sprints toward the place where he is standing. 

When she reaches him, she grasps his robe with both small fists. “Really, Daddy? I mean … Dad? Really?”

Tenzin places his hand on her head and relishes the true pleasure that only comes from giving one’s child precisely what they want most in the world. 

“You’re ready,” he nods. “You’ve more than proven yourself.” Her eyes are almost tearful, but they disappear as she presses her face against him and wraps her arms around his waist.

Kai is beaming just a few feet away, probably because Jinora is so happy. It’s not clear that he completely understands. “Help me carry these inside,” Tenzin says to him, holding the bundle over Jinora’s head. “We’ll gather more after the meal.”

Kai and Jinora, Meelo and Ikki each grab a corner of the cloak and begin walking it inside the main building. They pass acolytes toting dishes and pillows out to the courtyard and finally come to a room full of work tables, bolts of orange and yellow fabric leaning against the walls. They lay the cloak across one of the surfaces, the blooms falling in a loose pile that spills onto the benches and floor. 

“Will we really make all the ink ourselves, Daddy?” asks Ikki. 

“If we all work together.” He knows he could order ink from town, but some traditions are worth preserving. “Back when I became a master, your grandparents and aunt and uncle worked for months to make enough. With the entire Air Nation working together, we can have Jinora’s ceremony in a little over a week.”

His oldest child is smiling thoughtfully as she runs a hand softly over the blue blossoms that will catalyze her rite of passage. 

“They’re so beautiful,” she says. “We should take some to Korra.”

Something inside of Tenzin clenches, and his voice is hoarse when he replies, “Yes, I think that’s a lovely idea.”

Jinora and Ikki gather several clumps with longer stems into their arms, and Tenzin follows them with Kai and Meelo in tow as they carry them to the kitchen to fill a pitcher full of water and then begin a trek back across the courtyard to the family quarters where Korra convalesces. 

The courtyard is full of people now, and trays of food are being brought out from the kitchen. “Mud morrring!” calls Bolin, his mouth full of one of the dumplings from the plate he is setting down. Opal and Mako turn to see who he is calling to.

“We’re taking flowers to Korra!” Ikki shouts. 

“We want to come!” he calls back, and in an instant, there are eight of them walking inside the house, and Tenzin is worried that this will all be too much. Korra has barely spoken a dozen words since they returned, and she tires easily. 

“Can Korra come eat breakfast outside with us?” Meelo asks. 

“Maybe in a couple of days, Meelo. She can’t leave her bed just yet.”

He stands in front of the door once they reach her room and does his best to look stern, but it’s difficult. The bruises on his face still smart if he contorts it too much. “I’ll let everyone into this room on one condition,” he says as if he is talking to an entire group of toddlers. “And that’s that everyone stays quiet.”

Mako pulls himself up taller, his characteristically solemn expression saying he’s 100% on Tenzin’s side and doesn’t need to be told how to behave. Bolin raises a hand to swear, and Ikki claps both of hers over her mouth. After a few seconds, Tenzin is satisfied. 

He knocks on the door softly and hears Asami’s voice. He opens it and feels everyone pressing in behind him. Meelo forces his way between his legs, and Tenzin catches him by the collar before he can take a run at the bed. 

Tonraq is sitting next to the bed, his back slightly hunched. He smiles when he sees Tenzin and leans down over his daughter. “You have visitors, sweetheart,” he whispers in her ear. 

The figure in the bed stirs slightly, and Asami swoops in to help her sit up, piling pillows up behind her back and smoothing her hair away from her face. Tonraq stands to let Tenzin assume his chair, for that he is grateful. He has been on his feet since very early in the morning. 

“She has more color today,” says Tonraq, his face exhausted but full of hope. And Tenzin supposes that he must be right, although Korra still looks like a shadow of herself, her body barely supporting her own weight as she sits awkwardly in bed, the sunken rings around her eyes suggesting a degree of weariness and pain that Tenzin can only begin to guess at. 

For a whole minute, everyone holds their breath. It isn’t clear that Korra is even aware of them. But then Mako walks across the room and opens the window, allowing the sun and a salt breeze to waft inside. Tenzin sees her face incline slightly toward the light, and the look that comes over her is almost peaceful as she closes her eyes and opens them again. 

“What are you all doing here?” she asks, her voice barely audible, and Tenzin wonders if she realizes that in three whole days, they have barely allowed her a second alone. The space she occupies on the bed feels like a world unto itself, cut off from the land of the unbroken.

All of a sudden, Ikki’s hands fly from her mouth, where they’ve been pressed this entire time. “Jinora is getting her tattoos!” she says, the pent up pressure giving way in a sudden burst of chatter. 

Tenzin feels Korra make eye contact with him for the first time, her eyebrows raising slightly, and then she finds Jinora, who is perched next to Tenzin’s chair, and a tiny smile creeps over her face. “Really?” she says, but it’s barely a whisper. 

“Really,” Jinora beams and holds out the pitcher of flowers she’s been holding tightly against her chest. “These are the flowers we use to make the tattoo ink. I thought we should bring you some to brighten up your room.” 

Korra’s hand reaches forward and then pulls back, but not before Tenzin sees the tremor she is trying desperately to conceal. Asami reaches down to take the pitcher and brings the fragrant blooms to Korra’s face. They are almost precisely the color of her eyes, which she closes for a second and inhales.

“They’re beautiful,” says Asami, as if speaking for both of them. Korra nods, and as Asami walks away to place the flowers in the sunlight, Tenzin sees that Jinora has taken the Avatar’s trembling hand in both of her own. 

…

It takes thousands of small blooms to make enough ink for one airbender’s tattoos, but there are many hands to gather them. On the third day of harvesting, Tenzin walks from tree to tree, stopping every few minutes to rest and watch the work take place. Kai is up on a high branch, gathering flowers for his pint-sized bison to carry. Bolin darts about in the shade with Meelo perched on his shoulders, creating earth platforms for acolytes who can’t reach once the low hanging branches are harvested. They have a rule never to pick more than two-thirds of the flowers on any given tree. 

Tenzin carries bundles back to Pema, who arranges the flowers in the sun for drying. Rohan is suspended from the sling on her back, and Tenzin places a few blooms in her hair as he bends to kiss the top of her head. 

In the workshop, Asami is overseeing Ryu, Daw and a handful of others as they crush the dried petals into powder, breaking cells that are too tiny to see in order to release their blue pigment. Ryu tries to look above it all, but the presence of the Sato girl, who expertly mixes the substances that will bind the ink together, clearly motivates him to work a little harder. 

“It’s sad to be smashing all these flowers,” Daw remarks, shaking a hand that is cramping from hours of gripping the pestle. 

“Wait until you see the final result,” Tenzin assures. Zaheer was right about a few things. 

…

When he sets out for the stand of trees again, he sees Mako coming out of the family quarters with Tonraq. And in Mako’s arms is a bundle of blankets that Tenzin realizes on closer examination is a person, her head propped listlessly on the young man’s shoulder. 

“We thought she should see it before you’re finished,” says Tonraq. “And the fresh air can’t hurt.”

Tenzin looks at Korra, whose expression is mostly blank. She stares straight back at him, though, focusing better than she has in days, though he can still see the broken capillaries around her eyes and the fading bruises that peek out from under the blankets. 

A thought occurs to him out of nowhere. “Where is her polar-bear dog?” 

Tonraq whistles, a sharp, piercing sound, and Korra’s face lifts up from Mako’s shoulder as Naga careens around a corner, and Mako edges backward with trepidation in his eyes to keep from being tackled and yet not drop her. 

“Hey girl,” Korra whispers, and a shaking hand emerges from the blanket to caress the giant head. They walk that way until they reach the others.

“Korra’s here!” Ikki screams, and everyone stops their work to turn and watch. Tenzin looks at her closely and sees her turn her face into Mako’s chest, away from the eyes that peer from the trees. 

“Back to work!” Tenzin shouts, and the spell is broken. Everyone returns to their gathering, stealing peeks every now and then as Tonraq makes a bed for her underneath a tree and Mako arranges her carefully on the ground and Naga curls up close enough for Korra to keep a hand always against the warm, white fur. 

The stand is quieter with her there, everyone working while trying not to disturb the atmosphere around her. Tenzin is tired. His legs ache from too much standing, and he feels an urge to close his eyes. 

Jinora tugs on his robe and holds a bundle of blossoms toward him. “Can I give these to her?” she asks warily, clearly sensitive to his protective instinct. 

“Of course,” he says, and he feels a laugh bubble up from his chest. “But you’ve already filled her room with them.” 

“I think it makes her happy,” she says, though Tenzin wonders how she can tell. 

He follows his daughter over to the tree, and Tonraq makes a space for him next to Korra. Mako has taken Meelo from Bolin’s shoulders and lets the little boy direct him to the right branches like a drum major directing a one-man band. 

The grass is soft, and Tenzin rests his back against the trunk of the tree as Jinora arranges flowers around Korra’s prone form. Ikki follows suit and brings her own to drape over Naga’s huge paws. Korra’s hands still shake, but she fingers the tiny buds as she looks straight upward into the branches. Her face affectless, but concentrated, and Tenzin wonders what she sees. 

He tilts his head upward and sees light and shadow, oblique rays of afternoon sun peeking shyly through the dark branches of the tree. He hears the sounds of quiet talking, of people working together, of the new and the old coming together. And as he closes his eyes, his hand finds the warm shoulder of the woman who was broken for their sake. And he ponders the cost.


	3. Jinora

Jinora hears a grunt of frustration as yet another book claps shut and gets deposited on the floor. “What’s wrong with that one?” she asks, looking down at Mako and the untidy pile of books deemed unacceptable for his particular purposes.

“I’m pretty sure she’ll think it’s boring,” he says. Jinora scans his messy stacks and notes that there are two main categories of books Mako seems to reject: those having to do with romance and those written by or about any and all airbending gurus. Everything else falls under the heading of “probably too boring.”

“But you liked that one when you borrowed it,” she responds, referring to the tome of Earth Kingdom history that he has just rejected. 

“Yeah. I just don’t think she will.”

Jinora watches him run his fingers through his hair and self-consciously raises a hand to touch her own. “Maybe this was a bad idea,” she says. 

“No,” he says, selecting another volume off the shelf. “It’s a good idea.” And Jinora feels a little taller. She likes Korra’s friends because they treat her like she’s their age, especially Mako. But then again, Mako doesn’t treat anyone like a kid, even the really little kids. He just expects everyone to be on his level, and he tends to reward those who rise to it.

As he turns his head back to the books, she tries to straighten up the mess. If it’s a good idea, she thinks, why is it this hard for him? Whenever she thinks of Korra and Mako, it’s hard not to also think of herself and Kai. If Kai were sick and couldn’t talk much, she knows exactly what she’d read to him, and the thought makes her slightly wistful. What happened to Korra still makes her sad, but there is something undeniably romantic about caring for someone you love like that, and she is certain Mako still loves Korra that way. 

She imagines what she would do if Kai got sick – not seriously sick, just sick enough that she could sit by his bed and bring him soup and read him stories and hold his hand while he falls asleep. She imagines that she would do everything for him, and a picture forms in her mind of the way she would want him to look back at her, full of gratitude and adoration. Her books are full of plenty of people who fall in love or whose love is cemented forever in precisely this way. 

“Grrrrrmph.” The grunts coming from Mako get more and more despairing. He stares up at her from his spot on the floor and raises a book. “I don’t know. What about this?”

She leans down over him, her hand still absently tucking and retucking her hair behind one ear. “Oh, Kyoshi? I’m sure that would be fine. It’s interesting and exciting and…”

“Yeah, but like the past lives stuff. You don’t think that might be too … you know … painful?”

She smiles at him indulgently. “I think you’re overthinking this. The whole point is just to keep her company, just let her hear the sound of your voice.”

“Yeah … I don’t think that’s going to be enough in this case.”

Jinora laughs because she doesn’t know quite what she should say. The dance that Korra and Mako do perplexes her to no end. It doesn’t make sense not to be with someone if you love them. She isn’t sure if what she feels for Kai is love exactly, but she knows that what she feels for him is important and that she wouldn’t let anything silly get in the way of it. 

It’s only when Mako starts staring at her again that she realizes she’s still touching her hair while she thinks.

“Maybe I should shave my head too,” he says, cutting to the crux of the matter. 

She folds her hands behind her back, forcing them to be still. “You wouldn’t.”

“It’d be more comfortable in the summer. I wouldn’t have to worry about setting it on fire…”

“You love your hair.” She thinks of the time Korra told her that he gels it to make it stand up in that particular way. 

“I do not.”

“You do too.” She’s grinning broadly as she stares down at him, and she knows precisely which moves lead to checkmate in this scenario. “And besides, Korra would hate it.”

His face gets a little red. “Why would I care what Korra thinks?” 

“You care,” she says, hands on her hips, looking down on him imperiously. “You can’t help it. You just do.”

“Well, are you worried about what Kai is going to think?”

“Maybe a little,” she confesses, heat rising up the back of her neck. He’s more perceptive than he thinks. If he can sense she’s nervous about the head shaving, she wonders why he doesn’t trust himself when it comes to picking out a book for Korra.

“Well, don’t. He’s not worth it.”

“I thought you liked Kai now. He saved you and your brother…”

“I tolerate Kai now. There’s a difference.”

“Ok. Why don’t you like him?”

Mako shrugs. “Well, he’s got some good qualities, but he’s still a thief. And a liar. And he reminds me…”

“…of yourself?” Jinora says, one side of her mouth curving up into a sly grin. 

She thinks maybe she’s finally overstepped a line, but Mako laughs. “Yeah,” he says, staring deeply at the book he’s holding but clearly not absorbing.

“You need to learn to like yourself more,” she replies, satisfied that she has won this round, because after ten whole seconds, Mako still doesn’t have anything to say back. 

…

In the end, he goes with Kyoshi, the choice a result of such prolonged and painful deliberation that Jinora feels exhausted as she carries the book for him while they go to see what’s available as far as tea and snacks go. She thinks it’s interesting, the practiced way he moves around a kitchen, lighting the fire for the kettle with the tip of his finger and arranging cups on a tray very carefully and precisely. He is like a grown-up except not quite, at least not like the other grown-ups she knows. There is effort in it, like he’s been successfully faking it for years and is afraid of being found out. 

“What’s it like living with just your brother?” she asks. She feels overwhelmed sometimes helping take care of Ikki and Meelo and Rohan, but she knows she has never had to feel the full weight of that terrible responsibility. 

“It’s been a long time since it was any other way,” he responds, and she is ashamed when she remembers that he had parents once too. 

“Sorry … I forget sometimes.”

He shrugs and idly moves the cups around the tray again, as if there is a right way for them to go and he just can’t figure it out. “I’ve made peace with it.”

“I can’t imagine having to take care of my little sister and brothers like that.”

“Well, I just had one of them.”

She smiles. “That’s true. Still, that sounds … hard.” Hard, of course, can’t cover it. The hardness of it is beyond her imagination. 

“I dunno. I just went by instinct … just tried to figure out what he would need.”

“Well, your instinct did a good job. I mean, Bolin is really great.”

“I doubt I had much to do with that,” he says, but there is pure gratitude in his eyes when he looks back at her. She tucks that piece of information away for the next time she wants to give him a compliment. 

…

When they enter the room, Korra sits framed in the window against a halo of light from the overcast sky. She’s in a blue robe, and Jinora can see that her hair has been freshly washed and brushed. There’s still an unwelcome darkness that creeps over her skin in splotches, a slackness to her posture, and a furrowing of her brow that by now Jinora knows comes from almost constant pain. 

“I’m gonna go check in at the office, you guys,” says Asami, brushing past them on her way out the door. “Have a nice time.” She turns in the doorway and waves to Korra, who says a faint goodbye of her own. 

Mako walks forward and sets the tea service on the table. “You staying?” he asks, and Jinora notices for the first time that there are three cups on the tray. 

“Sure,” she says, flattered to be asked, to once again be granted a token of her equality. But, if she is completely honest, she is a little disappointed that he doesn’t want to be alone with Korra. 

“What’s that?” Korra asks, nodding at the book. Jinora registers the weakness in her voice and the slight quality of her gestures. Her energy is different, more compact – like something bottled under pressure. The Korra she used to know filled up an entire room.

“Jinora suggested I read to you. So, you know, we don’t have to talk if you don’t want to and you don’t have to just sit with me in silence.”

Mako looks all tense. He keeps nudging the tea cups and fussing with the rolled sleeves on his jacket. 

“I don’t mind the quiet,” Korra says. “It’s enough.” 

And just like that, Jinora can feel Mako relax. He settles into his chair right next to Korra, a little more natural, a little more himself. 

And then Jinora observes a curious thing. Before either of them think to do so, Korra reaches for the teapot, her hands trembling as they lift from her lap. Jinora expects that Mako will grab it himself and pour the tea for her as Asami and Korra’s parents do. And when he doesn’t, she nearly leaps forward to do it herself. But a precise quality in his stillness makes Jinora think twice. 

Korra sets her face like Jinora has seen her do when practicing a new airbending form. She puts both shaking hands on the teapot and breaths two deep breaths. Mako still does not move, but his eyes follow her hands closely as he waits. He does not ask if she wants help. He doesn’t even reassure her that she can do it. They both simply watch as she slowly lifts it up and with fierce determination steadies her shaking hands. She brings the teapot toward her, and when the spout meets the lip of her cup, not a drop is spilt. 

When Korra finishes, a small breath escapes her lips, like she has just finished walking a tight rope. There is a shift in the energy of the room, like the shadow around her wheelchair has dispersed somewhat. And Jinora sees Mako beaming at her, a smile spreading across his face as he takes the pot from her and pours his own. And Jinora realizes that maybe this is how he raised a brother by himself. 

When Mako moves to serve her tea, Jinora refuses. “I just remembered I told my Dad I would help him with something,” she says, excusing herself from the table. 

“Thanks for coming,” Korra says. And Jinora thinks that her voice sounds stronger than before. 

In the doorway, she lingers, looking back as the two of them gaze out the window together, quiet, the book still unopened. Their arms lie next to one another on the table, and Jinora thinks that this would be the perfect time for him to hold her hand or to make some kind of declaration. But he doesn’t. And Jinora feels like she understands something just a little bit better: sometimes, love means simply waiting.


	4. Korra

Her days have fallen into a not entirely unpleasant routine. She is used to routines. Routines are familiar: wake up at dawn, run laps around the compound for one hour, breakfast at 8:00 before a full morning of firebending training, then lunch, tutoring, an hour or two with Naga, dinner, bath, and early to bed. 

The upheaval of the last year was the exception, and now her hours are once again ruthlessly divided into segments: she wakes early and stares at the wall for a while, trying not to send signals that she is awake because there is almost always someone nearby on alert. At 8:00, Pema brings breakfast with one or four children in tow. Then someone—Pema again or her mother—comes by to help her bathe and get into a fresh robe. Next, Kya arrives for healing and massage and gives her exercises to do until she’s in too much pain to continue. Then lunch. In the afternoon, someone usually takes her outside. If it’s Bolin, she gets dumplings. If it’s Asami, it’s news from town. If it’s Mako, she gets a blessed hour or two of not having to try and talk. Then there is dinner, and then she is in bed again, completely exhausted from a full day of doing almost nothing but breathing and trying to lift eating utensils from the plate to her face without making a mess. 

The routine is refreshingly predictable and stultifyingly dull. But today is different. Today is special. And it is making her anxious. 

She stares at the tray in her lap and tries to forget about her hands. She hides them under the covers and closes her eyes, takes three deep breaths and pretends they are someone else’s. It’s when she thinks about them too much that the shaking is worst. 

When it feels safe, she tries to lift them without looking at them, tries to find the chopsticks by touch. She insists on using the chopsticks . Three more deep breaths, and she is finally holding them between her fingers. Her other hand grasps the bowl—don’t think about it don’t think about it—and she starts to pick up some rice. She is sweating by the time it reaches her mouth, and that’s when the chopsticks start to slip. A few grains get into her mouth, but now she has to start over. 

She tries to remember what Tenzin keeps telling her: that each small step forward is a victory. It’s an unintentionally cruel metaphor, given that she can’t actually take steps without assistance, but she knows what he means. Still, it is hard to view sitting upright for 10 or 15 or 30 minutes at a time as a victory, to see feeding herself as movement forward. But she trusts Tenzin, and so she tries. 

The rice is almost completely cold by the time Asami enters. She has promised to help Korra get ready for the big day. Smiling, make-up applied with an engineer’s precision and an artist’s eye, Asami crosses the room and stops just next to the bed. Korra feels a little smaller underneath her gaze and looks down to see the small grains of rice dotting her front. 

“Hey,” Asami says. “Breakfast going ok?” and she makes a gesture Korra has come to recognize. Her hands dart forward and then kind of flutter in mid-air as she weighs the impulse to grab the chopsticks out of Korra’s quivering hands against pretending she just doesn’t see it. “Looks like you’re … making progress.” 

“It’s fine,” Korra says. She tries to bring the rice back up to her mouth when both chopsticks fall from her grip, bounce off the mattress, and clatter on the floor, taking whatever dignity she might have preserved with them. She feels her heart start to race in her chest as frustration seizes her and pain starts to bloom behind her eyes.

Asami quickly gathers the utensils before sitting down on the edge of the bed and gracefully gathering a bite of food to hold toward Korra’s mouth. “This will go faster if you let me help.” Her eyes are kind, but there is something else there too, a look of pleading. Asami hates to see Korra struggle, and Korra feels obliged to protect her from it. 

Sliding her hands back under the covers so that she can no longer see them, Korra ponders saying no. She wants to tell Asami that she can to do this herself. But she knows the very look of her is an argument against it. With fists clenched, she calculates the costs of further resistance. The shaking isn’t so bad, but the tingling is getting especially pronounced, pinpricks that begin at the tips of her fingers and toes and work their way up her limbs if she doesn’t calm down. “No, I could use the help.”

But as she gives into Asami, she takes the time to breathe, to imagine the point of light at the center of her consciousness, to try to empty her mind of angry and fearful thoughts and to keep the pain and weakness from gaining further territory. 

“That’s better,” Asami says, her painted lips curving upward. Korra does her best to go completely blank. She will need to in order to survive the rest of the day. 

It will be the first meal in a dozen that she doesn’t feed herself. Some days all the steps are backwards. 

…

It’s hard to be inconspicuous when you are the Avatar and you are in a wheelchair. Korra knows they can’t help themselves, that people are just going to look at her, but she also can’t help her resentment. In the corner where Asami has placed her, she looks down at her lap and tries to avoid the eyes by focusing on the individual blue threads in the fabric of her skirt.

Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty…

She keeps losing count and starting over. Someone stoops down slightly, and she looks up to see Lord Zuko’s scarred and wizened face. “That was tremendously moving,” he says, his eyes soft. “I was crying myself.” 

A flash of heat erupts across her neck and face. She wasn’t aware that anyone had noticed. You were crying because you were happy for Jinora, she insists to herself. It was that and nothing more. 

“Aang would have been so proud to see what you accomplished today.” She tries to look grateful, but this is the sort of shit people have been saying to her for two weeks straight, and it has ceased to have any meaning for her. 

“Your legacy as the Avatar is going to be tremendous.” The words stick to her skin and seep through her pores, and it hurts because legacies are for people who are eighty, not eighteen. She manages a faint word of thanks and feels him leave as she goes back to counting threads. 

But thoughts keep intruding without her permission. How would Tenzin’s speech have been any different if you had actually died … seventeen, no, nineteen, no…shit.

With her eyes screwed shut, she tries to imagine the point of light at her center, imagines that light pulsing slowly in time with the rhythm of her heart. She opens her eyes to see Jinora across the room, her newly tattooed head the only thing in the room more noticeable than a broken Avatar. 

Be happy for Jinora, she reminds herself. 

But the feeling she had at the ceremony is starting to return, the feeling that something malevolent is sitting just over her right shoulder, a thing made more fearsome because she can’t quite look at it. 

One, two, three, four, five … don’t cry, you are going to embarrass yourself. 

No sooner does she think it than the back of her throat starts to become tight and pressure builds behind her temples. She looks around very quickly for a way to escape before remembering that she would have no way to get there even if she could see it. 

Asami, come back already. 

She tries to count again, but the edges of her vision start to blur. It isn’t tears though. It’s more like the distortions she sees before a really awful headache. 

Not now. Not now not now not now not now. 

Her eye catches a clock, and she realizes that it has been, at most, five minutes since Asami left her to get food. But that five minutes has stretched into eons. It has become her entire existence. She looks toward Tenzin and Jinora and sees a future unfolding before her in which the airbenders roam the Earth and she remains trapped in this chair, a living corpse for people to smile at while dispensing pleasantries, respected for past heroisms but entirely useless in the present.

It is then that she realizes she can’t feel her hands. The stinging and prickling that has accompanied her every waking minute for the past two weeks is absent, but so too is everything else. She looks down to where they lie limply in her lap. There is nothing. No warmth from her legs. No sense of the fabric’s texture. They are inert. 

No no no no no no no…

She wills them to move, to tremble, to wave around wildly, whatever, but it’s like the connection between them and her brain has been cut off. It’s like they are no longer hers. 

“Korra?”

She looks up to see Asami, two plates of refreshments in her hands. And the alarm that spreads over the other woman’s face sets Korra’s pulse to thundering. She can tell. It must be really bad.

“Korra.” She looks on the edge of panic herself. “Korra, what’s wrong?”

“Asami…” is all she can choke out. “I need to… I need to…” For a second she thinks Asami will believe that she just needs to go to the bathroom, that her vision isn’t starting to tunnel and her breathing isn’t starting to get labored. But Korra’s confidence fails when she sees her motion someone over. 

“Mako, come here.” And Mako appears with three drinks in his hands, which he sets on the floor before kneeling next to the chair. She is glad for once that his face is so much less emotive than Asami’s. 

“What is it?” he asks.

I’m dying. I know what dying feels like, and I’m definitely dying. 

“I don’t know,” says Asami. “Should we get her parents? Tenzin?”

“No,” Korra finally manages to gasp out, terror seizing her at the thought it. She doesn’t want them to watch this happen to her. “Just take me some place else.”

Asami is still practically standing on one foot, her body angled like she might bolt for help at any second. But finally she grabs the wheelchair handles and whips Korra around, making for the nearest door with Mako in tow. 

“I still think we should tell somebody,” Asami blurts as they escape to the family sitting room. She is trying to be quiet, but her voice is nearly a whistle in Korra’s ears. 

“Give it a second,” Mako says. 

Spots are forming in Korra’s vision, and she is struggling at this point for each painful breath. A blob that resembles Mako comes into view. “Korra, tell me what’s going on,” he insists. 

“I can’t… I can’t…”

“Korra.” His voice is almost angry. She wants that. She wants him to be angry at her, angry for her. She wants everyone to quit being so damn nice. 

“I can’t feel anything,” she finally gasps out, her voice barely above a whisper. “I think I’m paralyzed.”

She looks down at her hands and sees Mako grab them in his and squeeze hard. 

“Can you feel that?” he asks. 

She shakes her head. She doesn’t. “Get me out of this chair.” Suddenly nothing seems more urgent than not being in the chair. 

In an instant, she is airborne as Mako scoops her up and lays her out on the sofa. “Go get Kya,” he says to Asami. 

Asami looks at Korra and hesitates. “Is that ok?” she asks. 

Korra nods, wondering why she hadn’t thought of it. “Thank you.”

“Korra, listen to me,” says Mako. “You aren’t paralyzed, ok? Look. You grabbed onto me just now.”

She looks and sees that her fist is still clutching a handful of Mako’s jacket. Suddenly the tingling returns, then a sharp pain running through her fingers and up her arm and through her chest. And she is torn between relief and further panic.

“Am I going crazy then?”

“No,” he says. 

“I can’t breathe.” She feels like she gets less air with every gasp. It will only be seconds—she’s sure—before she can’t draw breath at all. 

“I know,” he says. “Listen, I’m going to help you sit up, ok?”

“I can’t.”

“You can.” His eyes are stern, and he sounds like her surly pro-bending captain all over again. 

He pulls her into a seated position and sits behind her on the sofa, holding her body up with his. “Breathe with me, ok?”

She feels the movement of his chest behind her and tries to match the rhythm.

“Korra.” The voice she hears is Kya’s, and she turns to see the waterbender coming toward her, a water skin slung over one arm. Asami is still barely holding it together, but there is no panic in Kya’s face. 

“I’m not paralyzed, but I think I might still be dying,” Korra says as Kya kneels in front of her, gathering water into her hands. Her own voice sounds like a child’s.

Kya glances over her shoulder at Mako, get some essential piece of information from his eyes, and slowly moves her hands up Korra’s arms to her chest. The water is as cool and soothing as Kya’s presence, and almost immediately, Korra feels like she is actually taking in air again. 

“You definitely aren’t dying,” says Kya. “Asami, come over here and help Korra raise her arms over her head.”

Asami’s posture relaxes, and she looks grateful for something to do. Korra feels the gentle pressure of the other girl’s hands against her own, and then her arms feel like they are floating, floating up above her head, and the pressure in her chest starts to lift. Her ribs expand with ease again, and Korra feels like she could instantly fall into peaceful sleep as Asami lowers her arms back down and Mako maintains his firm hold around her waist and the bitter taste of adrenaline leaves her mouth. 

“Better?” says Kya.

Korra nods, ready to weep with relief. 

“Try to do it yourself now.”

She lifts her own arms, and though they are heavy and sore, they feel like they are part of her body once again. Closing her eyes, she does an inventory: toes, calves, thighs, stomach, arms. All intact, all still part of her, and all still aching. 

“I’m tired,” she says. She feels a tear escape out of the corner of one eye. “Don’t tell anyone, ok?”

Mako squeezes her body from behind, and Asami and Kya each take one of her hands. 

“We won’t,” says Asami. “But you tell one of us if you feel something like that happening again. We know what to do now, ok?”

Korra nods—hoping against hope that it never does—and allows Mako to carry her all the way back to her room. Asami brings the chair, but no one asks Korra to sit in it. 

Like they are performing their daily rites, the two women wash and dress Korra for bed while Mako sets himself up for the first watch of the night. Kya gives her something that sends a blissful kind of heaviness descending over her entire body, weighing her down with the promise of a deep sleep. And she gives in. 

Some days all the steps are backwards. But today is today. And tomorrow is tomorrow.


	5. Senna

Tonraq used to brag that Korra could bend three elements before she could walk. But Senna knows better. She remembers helping Korra totter on her chubby little legs before she could make a wave in the bathtub, much less bend earth and fire. With tiny fists gripping each of Senna’s index fingers, she would labor forward on uncertain ground, struggling until she found her balance. 

Her daughter learned to walk once, and now she is learning again. Except now Korra is the taller of the two of them, and her weight is heavy on Senna’s shoulder as she clings to her mother on one side, Kya on the other, Katara urging them forward. 

“You’ve done well with her so far, Kya,” the older woman says to her own daughter. 

“Thank you, mother,” Kya says, and Senna feels her adjust Korra’s right arm over her shoulder for better support. 

“Now Korra, we’re just going to walk across the room today, alright?”

“Okay.” Senna is pleased to hear the resolve return to her daughter’s voice, something that was missing during those two weeks of the most startling fragility. Korra grips her shoulder hard and Senna watches as her bare foot nudges forward a few inches and stops. 

“You can do this, sweetie.” She tries to feel as certain as she sounds.

“Thanks, mom,” Korra says before she inhales deeply and then puts as much weight as she can on the forward foot and tries to advance the other. 

Fifteen minutes later, they are three steps from the door, and the sweat is pouring off of Korra’s forehead and seeping into Senna’s clothes where their bodies are in contact. 

“I think maybe it’s time to stop,” Senna says. 

“No,” her daughter gasps, but her face is bright red and strands of hair are sticking to her cheeks. 

“We’ll let Korra decide,” Katara responds, though her face is as serious as death, and Senna feels her stomach clench a bit as she wonders what the healer is pondering inside her head. 

Korra lurches forward again, dragging Kya and Senna with her. And when they stop for another breather, Senna hears the sound of unburdened footsteps coming down the hallway. In the time since they left the bed, she almost forgot how quick and natural walking could be. 

Soon her husband’s giant body looms in the doorway. Senna watches his face light up when he sees Korra standing, looking far past the signs of effort written on her face and body. Tonraq only ever saw his daughter’s strength. From the moment she was born, his pride in her made him blind to any human weakness. When Korra would cry of hunger or exhaustion or loneliness, he would crow about the unmatched power of her lungs. 

“Hey Dad.” Korra’s mouth turns upward in a rare smile, and Senna feels her summon a final burst of energy to surge forward and brace herself against her father’s chest. 

Tonraq practically lifts her off her feet into a hug, giving Senna a chance to relieve the tension in her own shoulder. 

“She did well today,” says Katara. “But she needs rest now.”

Tonraq scoops his daughter into his arms—clearly relishing the strength that has returned to his own body—and makes the journey back to Korra’s bed in a few easy strides. “I’m so proud of you, sweetheart,” he says, kissing her on the forehead before stepping back to let the two healers near her. 

Katara’s ancient hands move with practiced ease over Korra’s body, and Kya’s move in tandem. As Senna watches, she thinks back to the first time she met the two of them and thought that she had never seen a mother and daughter so much the sound and echo of one another. The bent of Kya’s wrist as she completes a waterbending gesture is the perfect imitation of Katara’s, and painted on the faces of both women is a shared expression of wisdom and compassion hard-won. 

Senna has often looked at her daughter’s face and tried to find the pieces that are hers, but all she can ever see is Tonraq and a presence that feels as old as time itself. 

“Korra, is there still pain here?” Katara asks as her hands come over a spot that’s given her persistent trouble.

Korra’s eyes flit to her father, who is still smiling over her. “Not as bad,” she says, though Senna hears tension in her voice. 

“She’s a fighter,” he says approvingly. 

It’s when Tonraq leaves that pain returns to Korra’s face, as if she has been keeping it back at some great cost to herself. Senna takes her hand and feels her daughter squeeze it tight as Katara manipulates her knee and stretches muscles that have grown hard and inflexible. 

“Tell me a story or something, Mom,” she says. “Take my mind off it.”

It’s this part of her daughter that is uniquely hers, this part that needs her and only her. Tonraq knows the soldier, but Senna knows the girl. 

…

As Korra sleeps, Senna sips her tea in the family dining room and runs her hands over the pages of the book she grabbed at the very last second before leaving the South Pole. And she is thankful that she did. In it she has kept every memory, though some of them are not even hers. Senna didn’t watch her daughter grow up, at least not like other mothers do. She lived most of it vicariously, through reports from Korra’s teachers and guardians.

There is a picture of Korra being held by Katara and all three of Katara’s children. Senna never met Avatar Aang, and she always thinks of them as their mother’s. The four of them together rattles the image of perfect harmony that Senna gets when it’s just the old master and her waterbending child. It’s a reminder that all families are a messy coming together of contrasts as well as affinities. 

She doesn’t hear the footsteps until they are right on top of her. “Oh, I’m sorry,” a voice says, and Senna turns to see the tall girl with the beautiful hair. And close on her heels are the two brothers, the one with the open face and the quiet, serious one her daughter cried over last time she was in the South Pole. 

“It’s alright,” she says to the three of them as they stand awkwardly, like children caught eavesdropping in the doorway.

“We were on our way to see Korra,” the younger boy, Bolin, says. 

“She’s asleep. It was her first time trying to walk, and it wore her out I’m afraid.” 

Three pairs of eyebrows go up in unison, and she sees a touch of disappointment register in each face.

“We missed that?” asks Bolin.

Senna knows the feeling. 

“Come in and sit down.” She isn’t anxious for company, but she is curious about her daughter’s friends, who exist for her only as stories and a few brief hellos. 

They shuffle around the table. The boys look like they are calculating an appropriate distance, but Asami settles in fairly close.

“Can I ask you what you’re looking at?” the young woman asks. 

Senna smiles and pushes the book toward her. Asami turns the pages with perfectly manicured hands and smiles. “My mother kept a book like this when I was little.”

“When did she stop?”

“She died when I was six.”

Senna’s stomach drops, and she instinctively reaches a hand out to rest on Asami’s forearm. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t…”

“It’s ok!” The girl’s green eyes are warm. She gives Senna’s hand a squeeze, and her grip is gentler than Korra’s. “I take out that book every once in a while. It makes me feel connected to her.”

Senna looks to Mako and Bolin, who are leaning forward slightly in their seats, trying to get a look, and she remembers that they are orphans and wonders if any of this bothers them. 

“Come over here and see this,” Asami says.

Bolin scoots around the table. Mako strains at first but finally gets off the pillows to hover behind them. 

“Look how little Naga is,” Bolin says, pointing a thick finger at a photo of Korra and a white pup that rises roughly to her waist. 

Senna hears a laugh behind her and looks back to see Mako’s face all brightened up, a sight that sort of helps her understand what her daughter saw there. 

Asami flips the pages backward in time, back before the White Lotus, when they were a normal family. And Senna feels a twinge as a selfish part of her wishes she could carry her shattered child back and care for her in that tiny igloo like she used to when she was an infant. 

“So she has always worn her hair like that,” Asami says, pointing to the stubs of pigtails that frame the chubby three-year old face.

“She wouldn’t have it any other way,” Senna responds, remembering the first and only time she tried—and failed—to put her daughter’s hair in braids. 

“You look a lot alike in that picture.” This from Mako, who stares at the book thoughtfully, like he is trying to solve some nagging mystery. 

Senna looks at Korra and sees the shape of Tonraq’s face and the curve of his mouth in their daughter. And then she peers at the image of herself nearly two decades younger—not that much older, truth be told, than the young people gathered around her. Her hair is mussed, and exhaustion is evident in her face. Korra was a lot to keep up with back then. But there is something, something in the shape of the eyes and nose that seems familiar, and Senna understands that the Korra Mako sees in his head is the Korra of now. And it’s then that Senna realizes that when she closes her eyes, she sees the four-year old, the one who was taken away. 

They flip forward through the years, past the annual photos taken on Korra’s birthday, one of the few times a year the two of them would visit the White Lotus compound. There are pictures of Korra’s various bending masters and even a shot from six or seven years ago of Tenzin and his wife and their two oldest children. 

Sometimes Senna wonders what it would have been like to have more children. She doesn’t remember when they decided not to, but she feels sure that at some point, it was decided. Physically present or not, their one daughter took up every corner of their hearts. 

“There’s nothing from the last year, “ says Bolin, coming to the end.

“Because she was here,” says Asami. “With us.”

…

When Senna sees them again a couple of days later, they look like they are all sharing the same secret, their faces conspiratorial and wary. 

“Here,” Bolin says, his smile wide, thrusting a thin stack of paper towards her.

“Bolin.” Mako’s tone is exasperated, his arms crossed over his chest. “Don’t just … push them on her.”

Asami clears her throat as if to start over. “We thought you might...” she draws an unsealed envelope from her purse. “We thought you might like to have these.”

Senna looks at the fistful of paper in Bolin’s hands and realizes they are newspaper clippings. “FIRE FERRETS FACE WOLF BATS IN TOURNAMENT FINALS,” the top one screams with a quarter page photo of Korra and her teammates beaming into the camera. 

In Asami’s envelope is a set of photos on glossy paper: one of herself and Korra at a race track, one of the four of them in a strange metal city. 

“You don’t have to put them in the book or anything. We just thought, you know, since you weren’t here for any of it.”

Senna rarely gives into emotion except in times of extreme stress, but she feels a familiar burn in the back of her throat and at the edges of her eyes. She looks up and sees Mako reach into his jacket and draw out a photo that is slightly creased and worn at the corners.

“I wish we had more,” he says. “But you should definitely have this one.”

…

A week later, Senna watches as Korra makes it halfway down the hall, this time with Asami on one side and Bolin on the other while Mako looks on, his arms still folded but with a corner of his mouth turned up. 

Bolin keeps up a running commentary: “It’s the Fire Ferrets - wiiiiiith one substitution – heading toward the finish line. They are way in the lead. No one else even comes close!”

Korra nearly topples over from laughing, and Senna nudges the wheelchair a few inches forward so that she can collapse into it.

“And… huff huff… VICTORY!”

Once Korra is safely seated, Bolin throws himself on the floor and raises his fist in triumph. Mako nudges the boy with his toe almost irritably, but when he looks at Korra, Senna thinks he looks just like he does in the picture he gave her. 

Over tea, Korra begs Senna to drag the book out again. “I’m sorry, I just love this old thing.” And Senna smiles contentedly to herself as she watches her linger for a few seconds on the photos of their family and then skip quickly to the end. The deep past doesn’t hold the same meaning. 

“Ugh, I remember this,” Korra whispers, tracing a finger across the headline of the newspaper clippings, her face a mixture of emotions Senna can’t quite decipher. The three of them gather around her close—Bolin kneeling next to her chair, Asami sitting on her other side, and Mako hovering above, his hands gripping the chair just above her shoulders. Korra turns the new pages carefully, and when she comes to Mako’s contribution, Senna sees her reach back and hook the tips of the tall boy’s fingers with her own. 

This is also her family, she thinks, but not bitterly. Soldier and survivor, Avatar and child, hero, friend, beloved: they all have a piece of Korra, but she is no less whole for it.


	6. Bolin

Opal is always telling him to be honest about his feelings, but she also says that Korra probably wants some space and doesn’t need to hear everything he’s thinking right this minute. Bolin has difficulty reconciling these two things in his mind. Because he would like to tell Korra that he saw her beat Zaheer and that it was awesome but also really scary. And he would also like to talk to her about lavabending. And he wants to say that seeing her sick makes him sad, and he wants her to get better and knows she will get better because she is the best Avatar there ever was. 

But Opal says it’s probably not the best idea to lay all of that on her right now. And Opal is right about pretty much everything. So Bolin has found other ways to help.

His favorite fishmonger is a guy with no teeth who sells his morning haul near the dock. He has five silent crewmen who bring in the nets with arms as thick as oak trees, corded with ropy muscle, and tattoos on every inch of exposed skin. Opal is fidgety as Bolin looks over the selection, and he feels her fingers kind of hooking onto his rolled sleeve as her head jerks from left to right. 

“What do you think she’ll like?” he asks, staring at stacks of fish so fresh he’s sure some of them were moving just seconds ago.

Opal pulls herself a little closer, almost like she’s trying to hide behind him. “What?” she responds, watching a giant harpoon being unloaded from a nearby whaler. 

“I said, what kind of fish do you think she’ll like?!”

He watches Opal’s eyes dart in several directions but isn’t quite sure what that’s all about. Is she scared? 

“Oh, um, I don’t know.”

“What kind of fish do they eat at the South Pole?”

“Um…”

“We haf some nishe herring…”

“Herring it is then!” Bolin crows, and he watches as the seaman wraps half a dozen medium-sized fish in newspaper. 

“Who’th yer young lathy??”

“Eruk, this is Opal. Opal, Mako and I used to run deliveries for this guy back in the day.”

“Nice to… oh,” She instinctively extends her hand forward and then withdraws it when she sees his meaty paw, which is missing three fingers and is still slimy with fish juices. “Nice to meet you.” She plays with her hair to cover. “Your fish are lovely.”

Eruk’s face splits into an enormous toothless grin, and Bolin sees Opal quail a little bit before rallying and smiling back. 

“Thee’s fery prithy,” says Eruk, and Bolin feels a burst of pride on behalf of his girl even though he knows the sailor’s taste in women runs slightly contrary to his own. 

With his paper bundle tucked under one arm and his girlfriend hanging onto the other, Bolin walks tall all the way back to the ferry.

“You really used to deliver fish for him?” Opal asks.

“Oh, we didn’t deliver fish.”

He guesses by her look—though he can’t always tell for sure—that this may not be the right time to tell her all the details. But he promises that one day he will take her all over the city and show her the pro-bending arena and every spot where he ever won a fight and the fruit stand they used to steal from and the secret places in the park where you could catch a few hours of sleep before the police kicked you out. He’s proud of all of it because it’s part of him, though sometimes he wonders if he shouldn’t be. Mako sure isn’t as keen on talking about it. 

So far, he’s just taken Opal to Harmony Tower and the noodle shop. “It’s such a beautiful city,” she had said leaning over the side of the observation deck, and it was bliss because it was like she was paying him a compliment too. 

…

Meelo air scooters toward them as they get off the ferry, his face a vision of childish imperiousness. “Opal! You missed meditation this morning! What do you have to say for yourself?”

Opal rolls her eyes but gives Meelo a sisterly smile. “I was helping Bolin, Meelo. Your dad said it was fine.”

“Well that is no excuse!” His finger is still poised in the air when something else catches his attention, and his nose starts to wrinkle. “What’s that smell?” and points to the bundle under Bolin’s arm. 

“Fish!” he says, holding the package up proudly.

“We’re not allowed to have fish.”

“Yeah? Well, it’s not for you anyway.” He draws it back against his chest protectively. 

Meelo turns back to Opal. “You should pack,” he says. 

“Meelo, we’re not leaving until next week.”

“You should still pack.”

Bolin hoists the tiny airbender by the collar and sets off toward the temple with the five-year old swinging by his saffron robe. “Ok, boys who try to boss my girlfriend around get fed to the monster.” He’s legitimately irritated. Because he would rather just not think about Opal leaving for a little while. Again. 

Meelo struggles in his iron grip. “Nooooooo … what monster?”

“The fearsomest beast to ever walk on four legs,” Bolin says. 

“NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!” He howls for several more meters, but it’s clear that curiosity and outrage are doing battle in his head, and the lack of airbending suggests curiosity has the upper hand. His eyes dart from Bolin to Opal, who tries to look as stern and serious as she possibly can about the fate that awaits him.

When they round the corner near the small enclosure, Meelo crosses his arms in annoyance as Bolin sets him down. 

“That’s not a monster! That’s just Naga!”

“Yeah? NAGA, GET ‘IM!” 

Meelo shrieks as Naga lunges forward, tips him over with her nose, and runs her giant tongue over pretty much his entire body. 

“Noooooo…!” He is caught between screaming and giggling. “I don’t want you to eeeeaaat meee!”

“Ok fine,” Bolin relents. “Naga, down, girl.”

The beast swiftly obeys. And as Meelo bends himself dry, she catches a whiff of the package under Bolin’s arm and begins nudging at him insistently. 

“Yes, I bet you aaaaare hungry, aren’t you?” he coos, scratching her roughly on the head and tugging at one of her giant ears. 

He unwraps the package just a little and takes out a fish. In an instant, it disappears between her jaws, and Bolin frowns.

“Naga, I’ll never understand you,” he says. “These are the best fish in the city. You need to take your time and enjoy them.”

Opal comes closer and massages the polarbear dog’s white flank. “I bet she misses hunting.” 

“There is no hunting allowed on the…!” 

“We know, Meelo!”

“Would you like to make this more fun, Naga? Would you?” Bolin teases, and her huge club of a tail wags and thwacks Opal in the back.

Taking that as a “yes,” he steps back a few paces and holds a fish out at arm’s length. As Naga comes at him, he darts out of the enclosure, launches the fish into the blue, and is nearly knocked on his ass as the bulk of her goes racing by him to catch it in midair. 

“Nice,” says Opal, and Bolin feels his chest expand. That was “nice.” Naga comes careening back toward them, fish devoured, and Bolin takes another one by the tail and sends it flying. It begins it’s not so graceful arc, spinning end over end, when from his right side, Bolin feels a gust of wind, and the fish is propelled faster and higher as Naga stops for a second to watch it and then goes bounding into the distance.

Bolin turns to Meelo and raises his eyebrows. “Awesome,” he says, and the little boy grins back at him, tongue poking through the gaps in his teeth. 

“I want to try,” says Opal, settling into an airbending stance as Naga comes sprinting back. “I can do better than that.”

“Your wish is my command,” he says and launches another fish so hard his shoulder pops.

…

It takes only a couple of days before “Feeding Naga” becomes the favorite secret game of everyone who happens to stumble over them while they are playing it. 

“Does Korra know about this?” Asami asks when she comes across them on the third day.

“Taking care of Naga is my job. Korra said so,” Bolin is prepared to defend his methods to the death if anyone challenges him. He is the animal expert after all. Well, the expert on two animals specifically.

But Asami just watches as Naga leaps into the air way, way in the distance as her lunch ends its long descent, and when she comes sprinting back, the heiress holds out a manicured hand. “Gimme a fish,” she says. 

In a few minutes, it’s Bolin and Opal, Otaku and some acolyte, and Meelo and “milady” (as he insists on calling her) competing to see which team can make the fish go furthest. Otaku misses his target a lot, but that, Bolin says, is all just part of the challenge. 

…

When Mako finds them the next day coming in from work, Bolin’s is almost sure the fun is over. 

“What’s going on?”

“Naga’s eating … and she needs the exercise,” he says. And he’s not wrong. Naga’s belly has been hanging rather low the past couple of days. 

“Sure,” he says, looking at the ragged line of onlookers taking bets on various pairs. 

“Does Korra…”

“Take a fish,” Bolin says, shoving his last missile in his brother’s face. “Jinora hasn’t gotten a turn, and she needs a partner.”

Mako holds the fish by the tail between two fingers, looks at Jinora—who looks like she’s trying not to get her hopes up—and thinks. And then to Bolin’s delight, he grips it like a knife and sends it flying in a spiral, the light catching the silver scales as it flies forward, almost as if it’s swimming in the sky. Jinora sends a burst of air after it, and as Bolin watches, he wonders if Naga is going to have to dive straight off the cliff to catch it.

He looks back to Mako, who already has his arms crossed and is frowning thoughtfully as he watches Naga make the return trip. 

“You need to tell Korra about this,” he says, and as Bolin prepares to argue that Korra would love this even as money exchanges hands behind them (are Air Acolytes even supposed to have money?), Mako pulls out his own wallet and presses a fistful of yuans into his shirt. 

“And you’re going to need to buy more fish.”

…

Bolin nearly crashes into Korra’s mom as he jogs into her room. 

“Sorry!” he yells, grabbing her by the shoulders to steady her and then instantly letting go when he sees her startled face. “I was just, I mean, I didn’t mean…” He turns to Opal, searching for help. 

“Bolin would like to know if Korra can come out and play,” she says, and Bolin turns to see Korra’s mom smile back at them. 

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?” 

Bolin relaxes. He likes Korra’s mom. He likes that she’s here, and he likes that there are so many moms around the Island these days in general. Moms are nice. Bolin tries to think of his mom sometimes, but the image he conjures usually just turns into Mako, which is weeeeiird. 

Korra sits in her wheelchair next to the window. She’s dressed in her typical shirt and pants, but her boots are off and her hair is mostly hanging down. Bolin can see her in profile as he ambles past her mother, and as always, he just can’t quite figure out what the deal is. She doesn’t look sick or hurt. She hasn’t in a while. She looks like the same old Korra, his best friend, though he keeps hearing stuff from Mako and Asami and other people that it hurts her to move around a lot and that she sometimes can’t sleep and gets headaches. But when he talks to her, she just seems kind of sad, not sick. 

If there is something strange or bad happening with her, it’s something he can’t quite put his finger on. He desperately wants to fix it, for sure. But everyone keeps saying they just need to give her time. 

“Korra?” he says, trying his best to be quiet. Opal grabs his hand as they approach her chair, giving him courage. 

It takes longer than it should for her to look at him, and he wonders what she’s been thinking about. Her eyes are still kind of distant, and the darkness around them is the only thing that really tips him off that there is something physically wrong. 

“Hey Bo,” she says. 

“You are needed outside,” he says, grinning at her, trying to see if he can get her to smile.

“What for?”

“We need you to help us feed Naga.”

One of her eyebrows tilts up, and he knows that he’s at least gotten her attention, so he grabs the handles of her wheelchair (she walks waaaay too slow these days) and sets off for Naga’s enclosure. At one point, Opal puts her hand on his arm to get him to slow down, but he can’t help it. He’s excited. He feels certain that this is going to cheer her up.

No one else really knows she’s coming because he couldn’t be absolutely sure that she would, so when they arrive at their destination, everyone just kind of freezes for a second. But then…

“Korra’s here!” Meelo comes streaking toward them like the wind itself and clambers up into her lap, and Bolin sees her crack a smile and knows he’s already won. 

“Watch!” Meelo yells, jumping off her almost as quickly as he jumped on. Asami grabs a fish from the pile on the ground, hauls back, and lets it fly. Meelo’s wind blast sends it into a perfect spiral as Naga takes off a dead sprint. 

“You guys know she has a ball she can chase, right?”

“We use that when we run out of fish,” Bolin says, keeping his eyes on Naga’s path until he sees her leap and catch the fish far off in the distance. “But we’ve given her a lot of fish,” he admits. And his pockets are getting empty. 

(And fish and balls have different aerodynamics and so it’s hard to keep score because it’s like apples to oranges, and the guys placing the bets get mad, and…)

“Fifty meters,” comes the call over the radio, interrupting the train of Bolin’s thought. 

Asami frowns and Meelo stamps his foot in frustration. Their personal best is sixty-five.

Bolin turns back to Korra, and he feels triumphant when he sees that the smile hasn’t left her face. 

“This is insane,” she says, watching as the scorekeeper takes down Meelo and Asami’s distance. 

“You ok with this?” Mako says, walking over and squatting next to Korra’s chair. 

“Are you kidding? This is the most fun Naga’s had in her entire life.”

It’s then that the polarbear dog sights her and comes running at her so fast that Mako actually throws himself in front of her oncoming bulk and takes a tongue in the face for his troubles. 

Korra laughs—actually laughs—and takes the enormous head in both her hands, pressing her face close to Naga’s ear and whispering something Bolin can’t hear. 

“You want to try it?” Bolin asks, and Mako glares at him hard. Bolin turns to Opal and sees by the way she presses her lips together that he may have crossed a line. 

But Korra rubs Naga’s head one more time and says, “Sure.”

Bolin pumps a fist in the air, unable to contain his joy. “Yeeaaahh! The Avatar is back! See guys? You don’t need to treat her like she’s broken!”

Opal inhales loudly through her nose, and Bolin feels the urge to clap a hand over his own mouth, though he isn’t quite sure what exactly was wrong with what he just said.

“…not that anyone around here does that. And not that…I…”

“Just throw a fish for me, Bolin,” she says, and he can tell that she’s cutting through the awkwardness of it all for him, trying to give him an out, and he’s grateful. He grabs a fish from the pile and then turns to see her struggling a bit to get on her feet. His brother swoops in to help steady her, and Bolin realizes that he should have thought of that before the fish. 

“I’m ready,” she says, standing in a slightly awkward stance but standing nonetheless. 

Bolin feels a slight twinge of fear but pulls his arm back anyway, thrusts forward, and lets it go. 

Her air burst isn’t as powerful as he expected, but it hits the mark. 

“Thirty meters,” comes the call on the radio.

“Not bad!” he says as a smattering of applause erupts around them, but it’s hard to totally conceal his disappointment. He was sure she’d break fifty on her first try. “It takes a little while to get the timing right.”

Korra narrows her eyes and bites at her lip, but Bolin feels sure that she’ll do better next time. He hauls back and launches the fish in the air again. He’s gotten better throwing it in an aerodynamic way, so that it spirals instead of going end over end. 

He sees Korra’s strike go a little wild and hears a grunt of pain next to him. The burst of air glances off the fish and sort of knocks it out of the sky rather than propelling it forward. Naga has to regroup and grab it off the ground. 

When Bolin turns, Korra is being eased back into the chair by his brother, and she is squeezing her eyes shut like something really hurts. And Bolin’s heart sinks to his feet. He runs over to her, and his hands kind of flutter around. He isn’t sure if he should touch her. 

“I’m so, so sorry,” he says. “I’m sooooo, so sorry. I’m soooo so sooo so…”

“Bolin, it’s fine,” she finally says. And the pain starts to leave her face. “I just twisted funny is all.”

He breathes a little easier and looks to Mako to find out just how badly he screwed up. Mako’s face is softer than he expects. He doesn’t look terribly mad, just kind of concerned. He feels a hand on his back and turns to see Opal, who is making her sympathetic face. 

“Do you need to go back in?” Bolin asks. “I can take you. I can get you some tea, and I can…”

“If it’s all the same, I think I’d just like to stay and watch,” she says, and this time she looks right at him, and her eyes look a little less sad and tired. 

“You’re the Avatar,” he says. Turning back to the waiting group, he calls, “Who’s up next?! Assume the position!”

And as the next team steps forward, he feels a warm hand on his arm. 

When he turns around, she’s actually smiling at him. “Bolin, thanks,” she says. And Mako just crosses his arms and nods, his token stance of approval. 

“You did a good thing,” Opal says and leans to kiss him on the cheek. And as he blushes all the way to his socks, Bolin is almost completely sure that yeah, he did.


	7. Asami

She knows who it’s going to be before she even picks up the phone. 

“An inmate of the United Republic Federal Correction System is attempting to contact you. Will you accept the call?” She knows all the notes of this particular operator’s voice – tinny, metallic, grating. 

This time, she holds the receiver an inch from her ear for a full fifteen seconds before hanging up. 

Sometimes she thinks it would be easier if her father were just like her mother – past the point where she would need to worry about whether or not to take his phone call. She supposes it’s an awful thing to think, but she also isn’t sure she feels that bad about it. 

Her eyes scan the surface of her desk, fall on the stack of unopened mail and the folder of forms waiting for her signature. But it’s too late. Her focus is lost, just one of the many ways her father still manages to get to her even from inside a prison cell.

The clock hands are edging toward ten, and she decides she might as well leave early. At least she has something to look forward to today.

On her way out, she checks her preparations – cars gassed up and ready to go on the track, stacks of records ready to be played, and menus from everyone’s favorite take-out restaurants. It’s been a while since they’ve all been able to just hang out, just the four of them, and she’s been looking forward to the opportunity to spirit Korra away from the Island, which has felt increasingly claustrophobic with each passing weeks even as the emptiness of the mansion has become almost an embodied presence. Everywhere she walks, Asami thinks she hears voices, and she is often surprised by how disappointed she feels when it turns out to be no one. 

…

The morning is clear and warm on Air Temple Island. A salty breeze blows in from the west, ruffling the robes of each airbender as they form a group in front of the waiting bison. Tenzin’s words are brief – duty, peace, solidarity – but Asami smiles all the way through it. Watching them all together, preparing to initiate this new tradition, a reinvention of the old, makes her feel more hopeful. 

A year and a half ago, it would have scarcely seemed plausible that she would be included in something like this, that she would have somehow acquired a second family so large and so different from everything that she had be raised to value. As the airbenders pile onto the bison, she sighs to herself, more at peace, her father’s phone call a rapidly fading memory. She is ready to gather her friends and begin their day together and pretend to be normal people who listen to music and eat take-out noodles and gossip late into the night. Bolin keeps hugging Opal, who is the last one to mount the bison, and Asami makes a mental note to order extra noodles and his favorite rice liquor. 

Standing on tiptoe, Asami scans the crowd for Korra, surprised she hasn’t seen her yet. But what she what she finds makes her heart sink into her stomach. She thought Korra had abandoned the wheelchair for the cane over a week ago. She’d been doing so well, but now the metal contraption is back, and Korra doesn’t exactly look ready to go out: no boots, her hair hanging limply about her shoulders. She’s going to bail, is the first awful thought that comes to mind. And as she walks toward them, she berates herself for her own disappointment and the awful resentment it engenders. 

Getting closer doesn’t make her any more optimistic. Korra is staring at some fixed point in space, and there are dark rings around her eyes. 

“Hey Korra,” Asami says. “Do you want some help getting ready?” It takes Korra a second longer than it should to turn her head. Not this again - that thousand yard stare and all the signs of poor sleep. There are burst capillaries around Korra’s eyes, and Asami feels sympathetic, but at the same time she wants to scream why why why do you keep winding up back here? Just tell me what’s wrong already so we can fix this. 

Korra looks at her for a second, not quite comprehending, and then her eyes go wide. “Oh!” she exclaims, clearly remembering, but her face doesn’t register any real expression other than vague numbness. “Asami, I’m so sorry. I just don’t think it’s going to happen today.” 

Asami chews at her lip and looks up to find Tonraq and Senna’s apologetic faces. 

“Well, if you’re not feeling up to it,” she offers, trying to make herself ok with it. 

“We’ll do it soon, ok? I just need to get some rest. I didn’t…”

“Ok. It’s ok. I mean, is there anything that I can do? Do you want to talk or something?”

“No,” Korra starts. “I mean, let’s talk some other time, ok?”

“Ok.” Asami smiles, but the smile feels tight. She feels like bursting into tears right there. And she feels ashamed, like a pouting child. 

She watches closely as Korra’s parents wheel her back in the house, words too honest for the moment still clinging to her tongue. She is so lost in thought that she doesn’t notice Mako strolling up next to her.

“Not happening today, huh?” 

“She forgot,” Asami says, though she knows that’s not a fair characterization.

“Well, she looks rough. Her Mom said she didn’t sleep.”

“Yeah.” 

They are quiet for a minute while Asami turns over the question that’s been nagging at her. “Does she talk to you at all?” she finally blurts out. “I mean about what’s been going on with her?”

She’s watched the two of them move closer together over the weeks, though what exactly they are becoming isn’t quite clear. But Mako just looks back at her and shrugs, “Probably as much as she talks to you.”

“Then it’s not a whole lot.”

“I think you just gotta give it time,” he says. And for that she wants to slug him. It’s been weeks, months at this point. How long is it going to take before she snaps out of it? Katara even said there was nothing getting in the way of her complete recovery. Not physically at least.

“Asami!” a graceful hand falls lightly on her arm, and Asami turns to see the warm face of Su Yin Beifong, her radiant presence asserting itself almost harshly in the cloud of gloom that surrounds them. 

“Hi!” Asami tries to brush aside the hurt and frustration that still threatens to overwhelm her in the moment, but her greeting feels a little too enthusiastic.

“What a beautiful ceremony,” Su continues. “I can’t believe my little girl is going off to save the world!”

“It was nice.”

“Well, anyway. I didn’t mean to disturb you, but I was actually wondering if you and I could talk business. Perhaps I could stop by your office tomorrow, and we could have a chat about Future Industries and my plans for Zaofu?”

Asami looks at Mako, who shrugs. Then she looks back at the space in the courtyard left empty by Korra, and she turns back to Su Yin. “Let’s go right now.”

…

An afternoon showing Su Yin their operations and explaining their supply chain makes Asami feel, once again, like a competent adult rather than a child whose birthday party was cancelled. Su marvels at a new prototype airship, the design of which Asami had supervised directly. 

“You’ve done a remarkable job. Surely no one thought this company would recover after what your father did, but you’ve managed a heroic task here, and you are taking your company to new heights. Of that there is no doubt.”

Asami accepts the compliment as they stroll back into her office after their tour of the factory floor. But Su Yin’s frankness is disquieting, and she chews the inside of her cheek as she takes her place at the desk. 

Su Yin is quiet for a moment as they look at one another, and Asami can almost see her calculating her own breach of etiquette. “I’m sorry, dear. I feel now that I probably shouldn’t have brought up your father.”

Asami smiles and tries to cover her discomfort. “No no! That was a wonderful thing to say.” She leans back in her chair, and all of a sudden it’s like the exhaustion just seizes her. In the middle of saying something about how proud she is of all that she’s accomplished, she realizes that it’s getting harder to talk and that tears are burning at the corners of her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says, grabbing her purse and rifling for a handkerchief. “I don’t know where this is coming from.”

Su is faster, handing her own across the desk. “This is my fault, I’m afraid.”

“No, no no no. I mean, yes, but…” She wipes at the tears that simply refuse to stop and tries to laugh a little, but Su continues to look at her with such motherly concern that every feeling in the world just seems like it wants to come spilling out of her. “He called this morning,” she confesses.

“And?” Su Yin leans in closer, inviting her confidence. Never before had Asami considered how much she needed this – just some feeling of closeness with another human being. 

“And I wouldn’t even take the call. I just hung up. He’s called dozens of times. And I always just hang up. It’s horrible. I know it’s horrible, but I just… I just can’t.”

“Shhhhh,” Su Yin walks around the desk and folds Asami into her embrace, and Asami just lets her head hang down against the other woman’s shoulder. “It’s not horrible,” she whispers. Anyone would understand why…”

“But a big part of me wants to talk to him,” she sobs. And Su Yin pulls back to look at her and smooth the hair away from her forehead. “I have so much to say to him, so much to ask. And I’ve had so many opportunities, but I just…”

“I know. I know. Families are complicated. No one knows that better than me.”

And all of a sudden Asami remembers that Su didn’t speak to her sister for thirty years because of something that happened when they were kids. 

“And sometimes,” she continues. “Sometimes you have all of these things to say but it’s just never the right time to say them. You have to trust that one day the time will come. One day you will be ready.”

“But I keep thinking. I keep playing this over in my head, and what if he says things that are painful for me to hear. And what if he still hates me. And what if something were to happen to him in there and I never get the chance to find out?”

Su rubs her hands up and down Asami’s arms, soothing away the tension. “You can’t control any of that, darling. You just have to focus on what you can control. You have to focus on you.”

Asami feels the rigid parts inside of her start to give way a little bit – not all the way – but enough. She throws her arms around Su Yin’s neck one more time. “Thank you,” she whispers, and she thinks that she could almost let this woman rock her to sleep right there in the giant executive chair of her very own office.

…

Air Temple Island is quiet, eerily empty when Asami returns in the late afternoon, not quite knowing what she is looking for. All she knows is that she can’t quite bear to go back home. She passes Pema in the hallway and receives a silent squeeze on the arm as she carries a sleeping Rohan toward the nursery. The entire house feels like it is sleeping.

But Korra is not, and when Asami finds her, at first she is glad to see that Korra is standing. But she also sees that Korra is alone, staring out the window, searching the sky for something. The invisible barrier that Korra has placed between herself and everyone else is still present and palpable. 

Korra turns when Asami enters the room, and she meets no objection as she makes her way across the floor.

“Are you feeling better?” she ventures.

“I got some sleep finally,” Korra says. “Kya gave me some of that … some of that stuff.”

Asami feels guilty again. Because whatever else was going on with Korra, she clearly didn’t mean to bail. She didn’t want to bail. 

“I’m sorry again about earlier,” Korra says. “I know I’m a disappointing friend these days.”

The reflexive no you’re not forms on Asami’s tongue, but she’s done with polite dishonesty. “It’s just hard,” she starts. “I don’t know how to be, what to do, what to even think about what’s going on with you. I want to make you feel better, but it’s impossible to figure out how to do that.”

Korra huffs a little, and Asami looks over to see that she’s actually smiling. “I’m not even sure what to do about it. Some days, it’s all laid out so clear. Some days, I almost feel normal. But then others…”

Asami moves closer and hesitantly places a hand on Korra’s shoulder, and she can feel the tension in the other woman’s body release just a little bit. “I’ll hang on until you figure it out, ok?”

And what if she never does? – is the unwelcome thought that intrudes. What if she is always like this?

Control what you can control. 

A long moment passes before Asami hears Korra sigh deeply, and she looks over to see a tear tracking down her face. “I worry sometimes that no one needs me,” Korra says. “And that no one is ever going to need me again, especially not like this.” 

Asami closes her eyes and thinks about the airbenders leaving that morning to do Korra’s job, and she feels stupid just a second because of course. But then she pulls her friend a little closer, the friend whose frailty makes Asami feel her own, and feel it bitterly. “I think I know what you mean.”

They are quiet, but it’s a good kind of quiet. The boundary around Korra isn’t gone, but it’s porous. 

“Don’t stop trying, ok? With me.”

“I won’t,” Asami says.

An inmate of the United Republic Federal Correction System is attempting to contact you. Will you accept the call?


	8. Mako

Every night, Mako comes back to Air Temple Island with a stack of case files under his arm. “I can concentrate on these better over there,” he says to Bei Fong, who doesn’t even look at him as she waves him out the door.

The stack sits next to him during dinner, where he tries not to get caught watching Korra pick at her food. And it stays propped near the table while he helps with the clean up. And when he re-enters the family dining room with a pot of tea and two cups, there is a folder on the table in front of her, and she is carefully turning the pages. 

She looks up when she realizes he’s back, and the look she gives him is slightly embarrassed, hand coming up to shade her eyes. He knows better than to acknowledge it. He just plops back down on the floor next to her and takes the next file off the top of the stack, pulls a pen out of his jacket, and starts looking back over a witness report.

It’s quiet, just the flutter of pages and the scratching of a pen, and every once in a while, she makes a hmmm or a huh.

“Did you…” she starts. 

He looks patiently at her as she ponders the question. 

“Did you look into the girlfriend’s story? Because what the other witness says here doesn’t match the…”

“Yeah, I did,” he says. “And you’re right. Something’s really off. We can’t account for her whereabouts between 10 pm and 1 am that night.”

“Hmmmm…” Korra’s brows furrow, and she taps her upper lip with one finger as she keeps reading.

The truth is that they closed that case weeks ago. But he doesn’t have a lot of open cases right now, and this has been helping. Or at least it seems to be. Though Bei Fong would probably flay him he she knew he was letting the Avatar in on police work. 

Her eyes stay on the page, but he can see her concentration shift from what’s in front of her to something inside of her, and he holds his breath. He can never quite tell if she’s just daydreaming or if something darker is going on. She’ll just fade away for full minutes at a time. 

A deep inhale lets him know she’s back in the present, and just like that, she’s scanning the page one more time, her hand brushing over the creases, her teeth tugging at her lip. 

“Where’d you go?” he asks.

“What do you mean?’

“Nothing.” He laughs a little – because she never seems aware that she does it – and reaches over to the stack to pull a folder off the bottom. “This case has been cold for a while. See what you can make of it.” He flops it down in front of her, and she grabs at it eagerly.

Ten minutes later, her head keeps nodding forward, and he grabs her by the shoulder to keep her from smacking it on the table. 

“You should go to bed,” he says.

“I want to finish reading this.”

“Finish it in the morning.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

He looks up and sees her grinning at him. Her face is soft, but her eyes are red, and her smile turns into a yawn so big he can see the back of her throat. 

“Yeah, ok,” she relents.

“You need help?”

“Just help me off the floor.”

He stands up and grasps her by the arms and lets her use him as leverage to get on her feet. They’re close when she stands, close enough that he can smell her hair. And for no reason he can think of, he loops one arm around her shoulders and pulls her into an awkward hug. It’s quick, but she leans into him a little bit, and he feels like he could stay there forever.

“What was that for?” she asks, her look slightly sarcastic when she pulls back.

“Just saying thanks for the help.” And thank you for being alive.

He reaches down to the floor and grabs her staff, which she’s been using as a cane. 

“Well, good night,” she says as she takes it from him. 

And he watches her make her way slowly out of the room, one foot in front of the other.

“Yell if you get into a jam,” he calls after her. And she waves him off as she rounds the corner.

…

He takes the tea things into the kitchen and doesn’t even bother to turn on the light, though the sun has almost settled behind the bay, and the room is full of shadows. 

As he sets the cups on the counter, he hears a shifting in the corner and turns to see a small figure sitting at the tiny table by the window.

“Oh!” he says. 

With a wrinkled but steady hand, she places her own teacup back on the surfac. “Mako, right?” she says. 

He has never been alone in a room with this woman, whose white hair collects the fading sunset and radiates it back outward like a halo.

“Master…uh…”

“You can just call me Katara.” Her voice is slow and precise and commanding, like she is accustomed to people doing precisely what she tells them. 

“Right,” he says. But he can’t quite bring himself to say her name. “You didn’t have to stay in here. You could’ve come in there and…”

“I didn’t want to intrude,” she says, and before he can offer a protest, “Besides, this is my favorite window in the house.”

His tongue feels strangely dry. He has never been intimidated by Korra’s ever-impressive retinue of living legends, but this feels different. It’s like being trapped in room with a spirit older than time itself. It feels like an opportunity, like he’s one of the heroes in Jinora’s books, who is gets a rare audience with the oracle. And he doesn’t want to blow it. 

“Young man, make us some more tea, would you?”

He nods and turns to fill the kettle and reach back into the cupboard for clean cups. 

“It’s not easy,” she says, and he can feel her gaze on him without even turning around. “Being in love with an Avatar.”

He scorches the hairs on the back of his hand while lighting the burner. “We’re just friends,” he says reflexively, turning the gas down a notch and setting the kettle on top of the grate. 

“My mistake.” But when he glances at her, he sees that she is smiling at his discomfiture. The lines around her deep blue eyes are laughing at him. They look like Korra’s eyes. 

A minute of silence passes, and the only sound is the kettle heating up, the agitated water pinging like the pebbles Bolin would bend at roof gutters when they were kids. 

“How did you manage it?” he finally asks. 

He hears her breathe deeply and turns to see her looking out the window. “You have to hang onto the parts of yourself that are just your own,” she says. And he is confused but doesn’t want to ask too many questions. The kettle starts singing, and he reaches to take it off the stove and pour the water over the leaves in the diffuser. 

She continues looking out at the bay as he walks back toward the table.

“I never really liked Republic City, you know. This was Aang’s dream. But my home was always in the South.”

He looks at the blue robes she is wearing, a strange contrast to the yellows and oranges he is used to seeing on everyone in this household except for Korra. And it strikes him that at one point, this used to be her house. Or at least it might have been called hers. 

“Love involves compromises,” she says. “But Avatars come and go. And they belong to the world. And when they leave, you are left with yourself. With others, of course, but mostly yourself. So you had better know how to tend your own soul.”

He clings to his cup as she turns her eyes back to him, and he feels suddenly transparent. 

“We make our sacrifices. But you still need a life of your own. You still need to want things that have nothing to do with them. This is true of all lovers, but especially… especially…”

The air in the room feels alive, and he stares at the horizon line until it is almost totally dark, and all he can see of her is the silhouette of her face, a shadowy hand lifting the cup from the table. 

“I saw him die twice,” she says. “The first time, we were still children, and I brought him back. The second time…”

He feels the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. And a strange and ghoulish thought enters his mind. “What is it like?” he asks. “Being around her, when she’s…you know, when he’s…” He can’t quite find the proper words. Because the concept of one person dying and coming back as another has always felt abstract to him. 

“When I went to meet her for the first time, I wondered the same thing.” The waxing moonlight reflects in her eyes. The shadows that are her hands pull her cup closer to her body. “But when I saw her, she was just this little girl – so wild and so completely this other person…”

He thinks back a year to Korra pushing and shoving her way into his life despite all the ways in which he tried to resist her, until the point when he would have done or said or given absolutely anything to keep her with him. One time when she was storming out of their office (not the last time, but not the first time either), Bei Fong just laughed and shook her head. She couldn’t believe how different…

“The Avatar Spirit is what lives on,” she says. “We love the human – the mortal – who bears it. I loved Aang as Aang. And I love Korra as Korra. And you will find, if you continue to stay in her life, that they desperately need someone who knows the difference.”

He has seen Korra take on the aspect of a god, and he has seen Korra pushed to the limit of human endurance, and he has also felt her blood hot and her breath heavy and her skin pliable beneath his touch. It’s this last version of her that was, for a time, his and his alone.

“Love her well, Mako,” she says. “Love her in whatever way you choose. But guard your heart.”

He tries to drink the dregs from his cup, but he nearly chokes on it. He is thankful for the dark, because his eyes feel hot.

…

The next day is his day off, and he has forgotten to make any plans whatsoever. The morning is warm, sun heating the paving stones of the courtyard as he comes out of the men’s dormitory in search of some way to occupy his time. 

A sound that he thinks is a grunt comes from the direction of the training platform. And then something like a whoosh of air. All the airbenders are gone… 

He jogs toward the sound in time to see her finish the form – sort of. She’s unsteady on her feet, using her staff for stability. She is breathing hard, sweat beading on her forehead. 

He freezes, knowing he has walked in on something he isn’t supposed to see, but he isn’t sure how to make an inconspicuous exit. She starts the form again but stumbles out of the first turn and catches herself with a hand on the ground. It’s then that she sees him, her shoulders slumping forward as she just sort of lets herself collapse.

“Don’t tell anyone, ok?” she says.

He jogs forward and helps her off the ground. She leans heavily on the staff, and he wonders if he should go find her wheelchair. Instead, he whistles at Naga, sitting several yards away. And in seconds, the polarbear dog provides a nice place for Korra to slump. 

“How long have you been at this?” he asks, taking her arm to help her sit on the ground. She leans back into Naga’s flank, and he settles down next to her, knees drawn up to his chest.

“About two minutes before you showed up,” she says, closing her eyes and inhaling deeply as she catches her breath.

“Do you want my advice?” he asks.

“No, Captain. I do not.”

“Well, your form looks like shit,” he says. 

Her incredulous expression dissolves as bursts of laughter shake her body in between hard breaths, and finds himself smiling at her as she takes a corner of her shirt and dabs at her sweaty face. 

“When you feel up to it, I’m going to teach you how to bend lightning.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” 

Her head drops back against Naga’s white fur, and she closes her eyes, as content as he’s seen her since the fight. But her forehead still creases, and he wonders how much pain she’s still in. 

He looks ahead, giving her that much privacy as she finishes composing herself. His back is slightly tense, and he stretches his legs out, settling against the polarbear dog himself, so close to Korra that their shoulders are practically touching. The sun is back over the mountains, casting it’s long rays over the island and flooding the bay with light. 

“Are we ok now?” Her question is weary, like there’s a “finally” hanging onto the end of it even though the word never left her mouth. 

“I think so,” he offers, hoping she’ll take up the thread with some conciliatory statement of her own. 

Instead she sighs and lets her head fall against his shoulder, the gentle weight of her sinking into him a little at a time. And even though he’s touched her countless times since she was hurt, lifting her from her bed to her chair to the dinner table and just about every other place on the island, there is a tightness in his chest this time. As she shifts, the backs of their hands touch where they rest next to each other. And even though the warmth of her skin practically burns him, he doesn’t move away. 

“At least you aren’t still sleeping under your desk.”

He laughs a little; it was so long ago he can barely believe she remembers.

“Shocking as this may sound, it was even less comfortable than the Air Temple beds.”

She sighs again. “Well, Asami said you just needed some time to get over it.” 

Asami is too damn smart. 

“Over … you know …”

“Yeah. I know,” he interrupts. The last phrase he wants to hear from her mouth is “break up.” 

He shuts his eyes, suddenly weak and weary. And the next thing he knows, his cheek is pressed against the top of her head, and his knuckles are gently brushing against hers, fingers extending slightly. She sighs deeply. He feels her entire body heave upward and carry his with it. And he closes his eyes and turns his face so that his lips are pressed into her hair. “I’m still not,” he whispers. 

A breeze from the bay picks up strands that have sprung loose from her wolftail and tickles his face with them, but he doesn’t move. Her body shifts slightly, pressing against him just a little deeper. And though he can’t see her face, he is almost sure that he feels her smiling.


	9. Korra II

It is close to midnight when she hears the sound at her window, a faint tapping that makes her flip over to find three human faces and a fire ferret peering in at the window. 

Her feet hit the floor heavily, and she rolls her ankles a few times to get out the stiffness before making her way across the window. Her body still feels awkward and cumbersome, a sensation that is aggravated by her sleep-fogged brain. But she makes it to the window safe, and she is bathed in the soothing air of a warm summer night when it opens. And just below eye level are the faces of her friends. 

“Come on,” Bolin says, a particular urgency in his whisper.

“Where?” 

“You’ll see.”

She looks down at her pajamas. “Do I need to get dressed?”

“Nah,” he says, and she sees that both brothers are in pants and undershirts, and Asami is wearing something short and loose-fitting – not a nightgown exactly, but she certainly less buttoned-up than usual.

“Ok.” She boosts herself up on the windowsill, and each brother extends a hand to help her over and down. 

“Can you walk to the ferry?” asks Asami.

She looks back at the window, realizing she’s left both her staff and her boots back inside. The paving stones in the courtyard are slightly cool underneath her bare feet, and she gently scrapes the soles of them against the ground so that she can feel the texture. She bounces twice on her toes, and she feels a sudden urge to burst into a run, though it’s an impulse she can’t indulge. She still tires quickly.

“Yeah, I think so,” she decides, and she feels hands grab both of hers and pull her toward the water, sweeping her up in their gait as they hurry. 

“Guys, there is no ferry at this time of night. Wait, Asami, how did you even…”

“Shhhh.” Mako hushes her, squeezing her hand a little tighter. But honestly, what would anyone do if they were caught? Send them back to their rooms (and mansion) – these four heroes sneaking off like runaway children?

There’s a speedboat waiting at the pier. Korra recognizes the Future Industries seal on the prow and the evidence of Asami’s fine taste in the gold-trimmed wood paneling and the lush white leather seats. Mako helps her into the boat, where she finds a comfortable spot on the long couch in back. Bolin hops in front, and Asami takes the wheel. Korra feels the upholstery shift as Mako settles in next to her, elbows propped against the wood-grain, his long legs unfurling as he gets comfortable.

“What’s this all about,” she asks him, and in response, he simply smiles and winks. His pale skin nearly glows in the light of the full moon, and his hair is messy, and she realizes that for the first time in months, she is feeling the urge to run her fingers through it. 

“Grab a hold of something,” says Asami as she backs the boat out of its mooring and then guns the engine. The wind whips around them, lashing Korra’s hair against her face. And up ahead of her, she sees Bolin stand in the front of the boat and stretch his arms out. 

“Asami!” Mako yells, “Throw on the brake and let him really fly!” 

“What?” Asami yells back. The wind and the roar of the motor are so loud that Korra can only hear every other word they say. Finally, Mako settles back down next to her and shoots her a smile that makes her bite her lip. 

She feels the boat cutting through the water, stirring up a violent wake as it disrupts the surface of the bay. The moon is full and enormous, and she can feel the water’s power as it moves underneath her, coiling up and releasing like some giant muscled thing. 

Bolin gets tired of standing in the front and pushes Pabu out of the way as he fishes for something underneath his seat. It’s a bottle of something that he offers to Korra. She takes a drink, and the sweet burn of it hits the back of her throat as she passes it back. Mako waves the bottle off. 

Asami steers the boat around a rock outcropping, and Korra looks backwards as the last lights of the city disappear behind its shadow. Outside of their halo, she can see stars beyond counting in a sky so big it feels like it might crush her. The water is black as oil, shining slickly ahead of the boat’s headlights. 

She doesn’t know how long it takes – half an hour? An hour? But Asami starts to slow down, and bring the boat into an alcove in the rock face where the waves are relatively still. She ties the boat off, and Mako throws his long legs over the side, where he stands in water thigh deep and reaches out for someone to hand him something. Asami pulls her garment over her head to reveal a swimming costume, and Bolin strips off his pants and tank top and lets out a wild hoot as he leaps off the back of the boat where the water is deeper. 

He swims a few yards out and comes back up. “Mako, it’s better in just your underwear!”

Mako sort of shakes his head and holds out a hand to help Korra over. 

She watches as Bolin’s pale back vanishes under the water again while Pabu paddles in anxious circles around the place where he disappeared. And without a second thought, Korra pulls her top over her head and strips down to her wrappings. She sees Mako swallow hard as he takes her hand to help her over, and she finds that she isn’t displeased. Asami passes him a basket, which he holds above the water line as she jumps over the side herself, and the three of them make for a small beach that lies like a bed of pearls at the bottom of the limestone cliffs that glow white. 

Mako starts a fire with some driftwood that seems rather conveniently stacked beyond the reach of the tide. 

“Did you guys plan this?” she asks.

“You could say that,” says Asami, winking in her direction. Pabu races up from the water and makes a beeline for the basket before Asami sort of shoves him out of the way with her foot. Inside, there’s two more bottles of wine and a collection of various food items. 

Bolin shakes the water out of his hair, spraying the other three of them down. 

“The food!” Asami says. 

Bolin grabs a bottle and uncorks it. “Lighten up,” he says, offering it to Asami. 

She shrugs and takes a long drink before arranging their small picnic on a blanket next to Mako’s fire. 

“What gave you this idea?” Korra asked.

“We figured the only way to get you off that island was to kidnap you,” she said.

Korra laughs. “You were probably right.” She would like to say she’s lost count of the days since she last left, but in truth she has numbered every single one. 

“Just relax,” Asami says, handing her a box of cold dumplings. Korra takes one and bites into it, letting the juice roll down her chin. She settles into the sand, flat on her back, and looks up into sky, listening to the three of them move around her. The first bottle of wine is half gone before someone passes it to her. She takes just a small sip before giving it back and tries to feel every grain of sand against her bare skin. She wants to be sure to feel absolutely everything. 

“I miss Opal,” whines Bolin. Korra props herself up on her elbows to see him prostrate in his grief, Pabu perched on his back. 

“Enough,” says Asami, handing the wine back to him with a roll of her eyes. She stretches her pale legs out in the sand, picking a little of it up with her feet and watching it fall through the cracks between her toes. Her toenails are a deep red, almost black in the dim light of the fire. 

Something about it amuses Korra. “I never noticed how big your feet are, Asami.”

“Ha!” Her laugh comes in one short burst. “Well, I never get knocked off them.”

“I miss Opal.”

Asami kicks sand in his direction. “Drink.”

And he obeys. She turns her gaze back to Korra. “Literally all day with him,” she says by way of making her understand.

“I miss Tenzin,” Korra says. “And Jinora and Opal and all of them.”

Asami looks at her seriously. “Is it them you miss or is it what their leaving represents to you?”

Bolin looks at her sympathetically and hands the bottle over. “A little of both.” She drinks deeply this time. And the stars quiver a little bit when she looks back up at them.

“What do you miss, Mako?” Bolin asks.

“You’re all right here!” he says. 

“Well, what are you sad about, then? We’re all sad about something tonight.”

“What’s Asami sad about?”

Bolin cocks an eyebrow in her direction. Asami sighs heavily and leans back on both hands. “I talked to my dad today.”

Korra feels her eyes go large. “And?”

“And I’m glad I did it, I guess. He sounds like he’s sort of sorry.”

“Sort of?”

“I dunno. It’s complicated.”

Korra nods but doesn’t push it. She passes the bottle to Asami, who nurses it for a while, taking long drinks every few minutes until her lips are stained purple. 

“We didn’t find out what Mako’s sad about,” Korra says. She looks over at him, still wearing more clothes then the rest of them put together, but his shoulders are bare, and they flex under his weight as he leans back. 

“I’m not sad.”

Asami looks at the three of them. “Of the four of us, Mako’s the happiest. Someone write down the date.”

Bolin guffaws and rests his head on the backs of his hands. “Tells us about the last time you were really sad, then.”

There’s a long pause, and Korra feels her stomach get tight. She stares straight into the sky while they wait, picking a small cluster of stars and trying to trace the pattern.

“When Korra almost died.”

“Oh yeah,” Bolin says, turning red and burying his face in the sand. He has to spit a mouthful of grains out of the way when he comes back up. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring that up.” 

Korra turns her head and sees him looking her, his face etched with remorse. 

“It’s ok,” she says. “I think about it all the time.”

“Me too,” says Mako’s voice from somewhere behind her.

It’s the kind of statement that brings a halt to a conversation, but the silence that follows isn’t awkward. There’s just quiet, the kind they can all simply sit in because they are all thinking about the same thing, and there’s no need to really talk about it.

“This is a bummer,” Asami says, taking a swig from the bottle. She stands up, a little unsteady on her feet. She grabs a small bucket out of the picnic basket. “I’m gonna go build a sandcastle,” she says.

“I want to help!” Bolin yells, and he too sort of staggers to a standing position. 

“You want to come or you want to stay here?” Asami asks.

“I’ll watch from here,” Korra says.

Asami and Bolin make their site several feet away, and Korra smiles to herself as she listens to the sound of Asami bossing him around. She hears Mako move to get closer to her, but he doesn’t say anything, and they don’t touch.

“I’m sorry you have to think about that.” She says it before he can say it to her. Sometimes she honestly wonders if he doesn’t deserve better than this. There has been so much pain in his young life that it just doesn’t seem fair. 

“It’s a small price to pay,” he responds, almost as if he read her thoughts. 

It’s quiet for a long time. She hears him move every once and a while, but she never turns to look. She just wants to feel his presence, the heat that radiates off his body and fills the space between them. 

The stillness is only broken much later, when a commotion breaks out down the beach, and all of a sudden, Asami is chasing Bolin along the water line – neither of them running terribly straight.

“Well, I’m going to go see what that’s about,” he says, and she watches as he sprints effortlessly past her, his feet barely kicking up the sand behind him. And she notices that at some point, he took his shirt off, and the lines of his back are fully visible beneath the full moon. 

…

She waits. And at some point the fire becomes too hot, and Korra feels a sudden urge to pull away from it. Past the flames, she sees the cool, gentle roll of the ocean, and it’s as if each breaking wave is reaching out for her and then failing, retreating backward toward its origin. It beckons her in, shy and seductive and perilous. And so she gets up, struggling to her feet and moving forward, away from the circle of warmth toward a vast unknown. 

The sand is connected to the sea. She can feel it in each shifting step as she carefully places one foot in front of another. The sand is connected and so is the air. And so is the fire she leaves behind her. And so is she. It all comes together and becomes everything and nothing. The light is connected and so is the dark, the deep dark of the night and the ink-black water and all of their terrible secrets.

She moves forward, one step at a time, and she can hear the voices of her friends as they chase each other, and they are connected too. And she smiles to herself as she feels the sand turn wet and squelch between her toes with every step. And she feels the occasional sharp sting when her feet turn up a broken shell, and she feels the water as it embraces her ankles before being sucked back toward oblivion. 

She walks forward, and the sea envelops her until she can put her face down in it and swim, swim against the current, her body almost weightless. And underneath the surface it is pitch black and silent, and when she is tired of swimming, tired of coming up for breath every few seconds, she simply stays there, stays there in the quiet dark, the deepest stillness she can imagine, like a womb or a grave or like outer space without the stars. But she can feel the life teeming around her, the disturbances that aren’t currents but are living creatures and spirits, inhabiting and filling that space that seems as empty and transcendent as death. 

Pain begins to form in her chest as her lungs beg for air, and she holds out as long as she can before she comes back up and finds that the beach is not that far away, and if she stretches out her legs, she can stand on tiptoe and still keep her head above the surface.

And then she feels something move at her side, and a hand comes out to grab her arm, and when she turns, Mako is breathing hard with effort, and his eyes are a little too wide and a little too bright.

“Hey,” he says. “You ok?”

She looks at him a moment and then laughs, “I’m just fine, Officer. What? Were you coming out here to rescue me?”

His forehead crinkles, and he looks stung. “You walked off… I thought… I thought maybe…”

She read the fear in his eyes but laughs it off again. “This is my element. Or did you forget?” She wriggles away from him and raises a wave that breaks right in his face. 

He sputters and wipes the salt water from his eyes. She taunts him with her smile, wills him to come play with her. “Oh, I see how it is,” he says and lunges awkwardly in her direction. But he hasn’t a hope in the universe. Because this is where she draws her strength, her power. The water is hers to command, and for every attempt to dive down and grab her, she has a thousand moves at her disposal to punish him, to push him away. 

But after a minute she is already tired of the game. She dives down and comes back up to the surface until he is little more than an arm’s length away. He is panting for air, an inch from begging her for mercy. So she extends a hand, palm facing him, a sign of truce. And he smiles and presses his flat against hers, entwines their fingers together. And then she allows herself to be pulled forward until she has to brace herself with one hand on his bare chest. His feet touch the ground here, but hers do not, and the momentum carries her until they are very, very close indeed. But it isn’t bad. And she isn’t scared. Or at least not anymore. 

She can feel him panting by the frantic expansion of his chest and the air that puffs against her face. She studies the water as it beads on his skin and drips off the tip of his nose. She is aware, like no other time, of all the details. 

“I wish it could always be like this. Like tonight,” she says. 

“I know.” His voice cracks a little, and his head falls forward to press against hers. “Let’s just enjoy it while it lasts.”

She closes her eyes and listens to him breathe, and she knows that they are going to kiss before it happens, before his nose brushes against hers and before she wraps her arm tighter around his neck. And when it does, it’s full and open and ragged, and it’s the kind of kiss that she can feel throughout her entire body, from the way his tongue pushes against hers to the way his hands try to cover her whole back and the way her legs float forward and tangle with his as he crushes her tighter against his chest. 

“GROOOOOSSSS!” She breaks the kiss and whips her head so hard her hair whacks Mako in the face, and she turns to see Bolin standing on shore, his hands on his hips and his face the very picture of smugness. 

She turns back to Mako and just smiles, and then she puts her head back down in the water and swims to the beach while he struggles to keep up with her.

“Whatcha doin out there?” asks Bolin, and with a wave of her hand, Korra opens the earth underneath him and sinks him up to his knees in oozy, wet sand. 

Her body feels heavier on land, limbs leaden with the effort of swimming. But it’s a good kind of hurt, a hurt she recognizes, the hurt of a body that’s more living than dying. 

“What can I do to help?” she asks Asami, who is placing empty bottles and food wrappers back in the basket, a little wobbly on her feet. 

“Put out the fire, would you?” 

She walks a few feet back toward the waves and pulls water from the sea, which she uses to douse the flames. 

“I’m driving,” Mako says, holding a hand out for Asami’s keys, which she examines for a second before reluctantly giving them up.

…

The trip back is quiet. Korra, Bolin, and Asami sprawl out on the back seat. “I’m dizzy,” Asami says as she rests her head heavily on against Korra’s shoulder, the bottle of wine still in her hand. Korra loops an arm around her and peeks over her head to where Bolin is snoring with his head thrown back over the seat and Pabu curled up in his lap.

They come around the outcropping once again, and the silhouette of the city comes into view, its regular spires standing out against the jagged peaks behind them. The sky behind the mountains is slate grey with the dawn and ruddy at the edges. And Mako positions the boat parallel to the waves and kills the motor. 

“We’ll just watch the sun come up here,” he says, crawling into the back with the rest of them. 

Korra pushes Asami upright and scoots over to make room for him. Bolin is lolling over the side of the boat, a single arm supporting his head against the hull. As Mako settles in next to her, Korra feels his arm go around her waist and pull her back toward him. She fits into the gap his body makes and feels Asami nod violently before the motion wakes her, and she blinks at the reddening sky. “Mmmm,” she says, drawing her feet up onto the seat, knees up under her chin. 

“It’s beautiful,” Korra answers. 

They sit there until the sun finally pokes its rim above the ridgeline. And twice, as they sit there, Korra feels Mako reach up to smooth her hair, his lips pressing gently against her scalp. And she sighs and sinks deeper into him. Bolin snores loudly, and Asami blinks serenely at the horizon, her hair swept loose and wild by the wind.

The moment ends, as all things must, and as the early morning begins to warm the bay, Korra feels her body get heavy once again with exhaustion. Mako resumes his place at the wheel and turns toward Air Temple Island, which assumes the contours of a battlefield in Korra’s mind. She has been fighting for so long. Where, at last, will she rest?

But this is not a thing she ponders long, she who is in the morning of her destiny. She will fight a battle today, as always, against her own body’s frailty and against the waiting darkness. And she will win, she resolves. Because she must.


End file.
